Helping The Globe One Community At A Time

YPSILANTI, Mich. - The United States is going through an economic crisis in which Americans have noticed a trend. The trend associated with the economic crisis has families dropping drastically in social classes. There are white-collar workers being forced into blue-collar jobs. As a result, the people who are knocked out of those jobs are left to get minimum waged jobs or are unemployed. Within the last year, the news has religiously expressed the highest percentages of unemployment. The people within this trend include families living off state assistance. The Michigan Department of Human Services has experienced a great increase of families in need according to the http://www.michigan.gov/ site . The increase has caused MDHS to stretched.

(Photo Left: Sandra "Mama Sandra" Simmons and Charles Simmons taken by Afriika Boyd)

This problem has hit close to home for one Detroit native. Sandra “Mama Sandra” Simmons and husband Charles Simmons co-founded The Hush House Black Community Museum and Leadership Training Institute for Human Rights. Mama Sandra believes that a community should act as a family. This institution focuses on the current issues of society and works to solve them one-step at a time. According to their website, The Hush House offers leadership-training, programs for homeless and low-income families, space for the community meetings, and operates a community black world history museum according to it's Website. Mama Sandra has been an educator in higher education for more than 30 years.

Brittani Brown, a senior, and communications major at Eastern Michigan University met Mama Sandra during a Center for Multicultural Affairs event. Brown was amazed at Mama Sandra's unremarkable beauty. The conversation between the two started on the unmotivated African American student population on EMU’s campus and went global.“She really knows how to make you think smarter not harder, and I know that her efforts to stay involved in her community are not just to be glorified. She has a real sense of responsibility for her brothers and sisters” said Brown .Mama Sandra said “we have to learn how to use these skills again- skills of sharing and developing and to stop judging one and other.” Simmons has been helping families who have family members with felonies to start their own businesses by creating business plans. She is also currently working to connect the activist from the community not only in the Detroit area but also in other areas around the country  such as Illnois, Ohio, and Indiana.

Simmons has been ill on again and off again since the beginning of the fall but she is determine to finish what she has started and according to her husband he quotes her saying “not even pneumonia could keep me from helping the economy!”

"Each day lived is a day to serve."- Unknown