Joy Beat

Arun Rath: Chances are, if you spend any time following the news, it can feel like the world is coming apart at the seams. But if you look closer, you’ll find another story unfolding — one of kindness, progress and resilience.

That’s why we’re bringing you the Joy Beat, not as an escape from reality but as a reminder that there’s so much more to it. From our newsroom to your ears, we’re telling the stories of people working every day to make the world a bit brighter.

Today, we’re celebrating people who understand the power of community in fostering joy. Finding community brings comfort and guidance. It fulfills the fundamental human desire to belong. We’ll start in Springfield, Massachusetts, with someone who embodies this spirit, even when faced with circumstances that are decidedly not joyful.

Over the last few days of 2020, parishoners of the Martin Luther King Jr. Presbyterian Church in Springfield faced something truly heinous: Their place of worship had been torched — destroyed by a racist arson attack. The predominantly Black church, which dates back to the 1890s, was in ruins.

Over the last few years, the community worked to rebuild and heal. The restoration process is taxing, but through a shared vision and hope for a new beginning, the church began its journey to recovery.

That work could not be done without Reverend Dr. Terrlyn Curry Avery, pastor of the MLK Presbyterian Church, and her tireless work to rebuild her community. We’re lucky to be joined by the Reverend herself. Reverend Terrlyn, welcome to the Joy Beat!

Rev. Dr. Terrlyn Curry Avery: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Rath: Tell us about what you’re feeling right now, at this particular moment, because I can’t imagine the full range of emotions.

Curry Avery: Well, at this particular moment, I’m feeling excitement because I’m praying that we’re close to the end. We are hoping that we can be complete by mid to late summer, so I’m feeling a bit of joy right now.

Sometimes, when I’m having discussions around what has happened, of course, it does bring up some of the old feelings, but right now, in this moment, it’s a feeling of joy.

Rath: Tell us about the progress.

Curry Avery: So, it’s been slow because of COVID, actually. It happened at the end of 2020, but we know some things were delayed a bit as it relates to construction and things like that. It’s been a slow process, and we’ve really just been rebuilding since. We had some delays a little bit, but for right now, things are moving rather smoothly with rebuilds. We really have the outside redone; we’re now working on the inside of the building, which needed to be completely gutted out.

Rath: What has worship been like in that period?

Curry Avery: Well, we’ve had a lot of worship online! That was the beauty, in terms of this happening — if we can find some beauty and grace in this moment, it’s that it happened during a time where we were already worshipping online, so we didn’t feel so displaced as we would have if we were to have been in the building.

We worship online on fourth Sundays — the first and third Sundays, we worship in the MLK Family Service Center Gym. On second Sundays, we worship with another church. So, we’re finding our bearings here through all of it.

Rath: Again, it’s the most awful kind of thing to go through, and I just go back to how gutting it is to see a house of worship destroyed. But, at the same time, hearing you talk about — well, as a lot of people did, in terms of improvising how you worship during the pandemic and then, obviously, with the loss of your facility — in a way, it sort of harkens back to the old days of the church, right? The church was wherever you needed to worship.

Curry Avery: Exactly. And Arun, actually, when the church burned down, I was very clear with the parishioners and with the community that the church building burned down, but not the church. We have continued to do what churches are designed to do, which is to worship God, and to minister the community, and minister those who are in need spiritually. So, we actually haven’t missed a beat, even though the church burned down.

Again, I think that was really because we were already in place with COVID. We’ve continued to do diaper drives, we’ve done mental health workshops and initiatives, and we’ve just found other locations to do them in. We have continued to feed those who are in need, so we just keep it moving.

Rath: As I remember, you’re not just a reverend; you’re also a licensed psychologist. You understand how people deal with trauma. Can you talk about how you — I mean, you talked about how grace also plays into this, but it seems like an interesting conversation.

Curry Avery: My belief is that grace is really the center of everything — grace and love. For us, we’ve tried to move in that grace and, at the same time that we’removing in that grace, we deal with the reality of trauma. It is traumatizing to know that one would burn down your house of worship simply because of the color of your skin or because of your racial or ethnic background. That is traumatizing.

So, what we do is — and particularly me as a leader — is that we try to work through the psychology and the spirituality and the reality of what happened, while continuing to move through it in a state of grace because we know that God is always gracious to us. And we, in turn, are gracious to other people and try to be gracious to one another.

That does not mean we don’t expect the person to be held accountable, though, who committed this atrocity. We can still love that individual and move with grace, but there are consequences to our behavior. We all have to pay the price when we engage in certain behaviors.

Rath: It’s still just astounding, though, and very moving to me — someone who grew up going to church — that almost inexplicable Christian quality of forgiveness that you’re eliciting. It’s hard to understand, but it’s not hard to feel it.

Curry Avery: Right. But, you know, I do want to say, though, because forgiveness, again, does not mean that we don’t hold people accountable. Forgiveness is really about saying, “I cannot harbor this in my heart to the point that it’s going to let it interfere with the work that I am called to do. I’m not going to let this eat me up. I’m going to do the work that I need to do, right, to put myself in a better place.

Arun, I do not believe in spiritual bypassing, so I want to be clear about that because some people will say, “Oh, the Lord is gonna take care of this,” or, you know how we use those phrases. That is not the teaching that I believe in.

I believe that people do things that are evil. People do things that are hurtful and hateful, but we don’t have to live in that space. But we have to work through the trauma of that, the sadness of the grief. I mean, the grief of your house of worship being burned down, all those memories that you have in there, let’s work through it.

We’re not gonna pretend like it didn’t happen; we’re going to face it. We face it with grace, we face it with love, and we deal with whatever issues that might come up as a result of it. We hold that person accountable, but we don’t stay in that dark place. We stay in the place of love.

At the beginning, you asked me how I was feeling, and I said I was in a place of joy. I want to be clear: That person never took away my joy because that person didn’t give me my joy. The joy is internal. I’m feeling really excited in this moment because I feel like we’re close. We’re getting close to when we can move back in.

We have this wonderful celebration coming up, and we’re continuing to raise funds. So, I feel good in this present moment about what we’ve been able to accomplish in the last three years and what we will accomplish moving forward.

Rath: Well, that’s brilliant — psychologically and spiritually. Before we let you go, if people want to help out with the rebuilding and restarting, is there a way for them to help you out?

Curry Avery: Yes! They can go to MLKChurchMA.org and they can donate specifically to our fire fund. But you can go to MLKChurchMA.org for more information.

Rath: Reverend, it’s so good to talk with you. Thank you so much.

Curry Avery: Thank you so much for having me again.

Rath: That’s Reverend Dr. Terrlyn Curry-Avery, pastor of the MLK Presbyterian Church and this week’s Joy Beat honoree. You’re listening to the Joy Beat.

Next up, we’re heading to the Cape, diving straight into a story about how a group of retirees decided that their golden years would be spent not just enjoying the waters but saving them. Meet the self-proclaimed Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. While most people think of retirement as a time to relax, this community of women has channeled their energy into cleaning up Cape Cod’s freshwater ponds.

Armed with snorkels, wetsuits and a zest for life, this week’s Joy Beat honoree shows the power of collective action and the unexpected joys of picking up trash in Cape Cod’s ponds. We’re lucky to be joined by Susan Baur, head of the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. Susan, welcome to the Joy Beat!

Susan Baur: Hi, glad to be here.

Rath: So, tell us the story of how you decided to take the plunge.

Baur: Most people think they already know the answer to that question, which is that I’m supposed to be swimming around the pond, I see too much trash one day, and I think, “Oh, this is terrible!” And then, I start cleaning it up.

But that’s not at all the way it started. The way it started was that I swam for 18 years with turtles — pond turtles, snapping turtles, painted turtles, musk turtles. I was obsessed with seeing turtles because whenever I saw them, all my troubles went away. If I thought I was getting Alzheimer’s, if I thought that my house was gonna burn down or be destroyed in a hurricane, when I saw a turtle, I was a perfect person in a perfect world, and all was well.

That’s really an important part of the backstory because that’s what really powers the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. It’s that if you get a bunch of people into the flow, into a situation where you are wonderstruck by the naturalwrld and are doing something to help it, that you get that feeling that “I’m a perfect person in a perfect world, I’m exactly where I want to be,” and that turns you into a confident, joyful warrior for the planet. And that’s really the driving force behind OLAUG.

There was, of course, one day around 2018 when I was swimming around and I thought, “I rather like these small bits of trash because it tells me exactly where I am in the pond, but there’s too many of them.”

So, three of us grabbed a guy in a kayak and said, “Follow us!” and picked up like a bushel of trash, and we thought that was hot stuff. Now, we pick up two to 300 pounds out of a pond. It’s stuff that’s been there for 200 years, so we have everything from really, really old beer bottles, collector’s items, golf balls, plastic bags, plastic everything, lawn ornaments, kid toys, dog toys, always a fishing pole, very frequently a tire, sometimes a tractor tire. That takes four women. There’s almost nothing that three or four women cannot do.

That’s how it started, and that’s how it continues. But what makes it really unusual is that this is an environmental service that everyone who does it wants to do more of it. Everybody who hears about it wants to join us. It’s the joy that makes us feel so good. We want to help everyone. That is at the center of what we do.

Rath: I love the story of the personal, vital connection with nature that inspired all of this, but you found very quickly that that was something that was — well, it’s a very personal story, but this wasn’t just you. It was pretty infectious.

Baur: Yes, that’s a perfect word. The joy is infectious. I don’t think it comes from me — the enthusiasm may — but I’ve watched the people who have joined our group, and there are 30 of us now, and the job now is to start other chapters throughout Massachusetts and, frankly, throughout the country and maybe the world! We’ve gotten requests from all over. The infectious enthusiasm comes from the beauty of the natural world.

Rath: Take us through a day spent cleaning up a pond. How many participate generally, and what kind of trash do you find?

Baur: Oh, Lord. It’s actually a bit more complicated than it looks. Every pond we clean, we have to scout first. We have to make sure that the water is clear enough, that there is a parking place, that we have backup and an investment from the community because that’s part of what we want to do. We want to raise awareness, and we want to involve others, whether it’s pond coalitions or homeless groups.

We scout the pond, we swim along answer see lumber, garbage cans, golf balls, and a blue porcelain toilet. Oh, this is the mother load! This is wonderful that we’re going to do this. But we also do require a certain kind of unusual payment: Cookies. Homemade cookies. We work — whether it’s 10, 20, or all 30 of us — for cookies. The colder the water, the more coffee and hot chocolate you’ve got to bring with it.

We have a sign up, and people scramble to get on the big ponds and the ones with the big garbage. That’s what we all like, because it issuch a challenge. We bring up stuff that we don’t even know what it is. I mean, it’s wonderful — dog toys, balls of all kinds, kid toys, fireworks. Those are the worst. You can see them bleeding the green and red perchlorates all over the pond floor.

You know, I once found a cast iron sink. It had been there for over 150 years. And so then, the kayakers, who are also our communicators, put the paddle up on high, blow their safety whistles, and everybody returns. It’s so hard to stop. We get into arguments about stopping, you know, “Stop diving!” But you just see garbage, and you have to do it. It’s like picking blueberries, I guess.

Then, we all come back. We eat cookies and drink hot cocoa and coffee and are just triumphant. It is just such a wonderful feeling. I can watch as these people come into the group and, at first, they think, “Oh, this is a treasure hunt. This is exciting. I am exploring.” And after two or three dives, they come out of the water, and they say to absolutely nobody in particular, “Oh my God, that was fun! That was terrific!”

I think to myself, “You just drank the Kool-Aid. You are now on the side of the planet and nothing is going to stop you.”

Rath: That’s Susan Baur, head of the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. Susan, it’s been a blast talking with you. Thank you so much.

Baur: You’re welcome.

Rath: You’re listening to the Joy Beat.

Our last stop today is in Mattapan, one of Boston’s most diverse neighborhoods. Filled with first-generation immigrants, about 90% of its residents are people of color. Mattapan is also a low-income neighborhood and faces significant health problems that other, more affluent parts of Boston don’t.

Much of it comes down to diet. A recent study found that Mattapan has the city’s highest rate of obesity, and overall, just 18% of high school students in low-income communities in Boston are eating the recommended minimum of fruits and vegetables.

A community-specific problem calls for a community-specific solution, and this Joy Beat honoree is a group of problem-solvers from the community, working for the community. The Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition goes out and asks residents what crucial issues they should take on, and then they do just that. We’re joined by the executive director of the coalition, Shavel’le Olivier. Shavel’le, welcome to the Joy Beat!

Shavel’le Olivier: Thank you for having me.

Rath: As I mentioned, Mattapan residents face specific health issues. Talk about that in some more detail and why they’re so prevalent.

Shavel’le Olivier: Most definitely. One of the reasons why the health issues in Mattapan are so prevalent is [when we] think about how the Mattapan community came to be. Thinking long back ago, when the Mattapan community was mostly Jewish individuals, and so BBURG (Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group) happened and all of those things — “white flight” — and so, now, we have a group of 90% Black immigrants living now in the community of Mattapan.

There is a lot of institutional racism — yes, I’m going deep! — and it’s by design. Now we have a lot of fast food places. We have a lot of phone stores. We have a lot of hair stores. We have a lot of nail shops, and we have a lot of corner stores, as well.

All of those things are a recipe for our residents having more accessibility for those foods that are bad for them because they’re there; they’re cheap, and they’re affordable compared to healthy foods you would find at a farmers market or Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. Those insitutions, those grocery stores, are not as close to Mattapan residents.

You get all of that in there together, and then you’ll have a community that is suffering from high rates of chronic heart diseases and other diseases, such as obesity, hypertension and diabetes.

Rath: Wow, I mean, you just laid out a lot of the things that intersect in a lot of communities of color [that] I think, across the country, people have talked about for a long time now.

Taking us back to the founding of the coalition in 2006, what was going on then that motivated you and your colleagues to take this on? Because it’s a big thing.

Olivier: Yes. So, around that time, I was a teenager. Our organization was founded by Vivien Morris. She is a pediatric dietician by trade and lived in a community in Mattapan before a rezone to Hyde Park.

Because of her interest in obesity and the health of Black and brown individuals in general, she wanted to do something about that. She noticed the high rates of obesity in the community in Mattapan because of all of the things that I mentioned before. So her and her colleagues got together, and they wanted to collect information for residents about: What is it that they wanted to do to impact their health in a positive way?

After [Morris and her colleagues] got back the data and the information, they found that residents wanted more places to be physically active, and they wanted more places where they [could] get sources of healthy food that’s accessible and affordable.

So, they created the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition back in 2006. Then, in 2007, it was decided that we would run the community’s first farmers market.

Rath: Talk about how things expanded from there, because that on its own — a farmers market — is huge, I think, to address the kind of things you’re talking about.

Olivier: Definitely. Because food is a source of energy, and you need food to live. That’s just how the body is designed.

So, right now, we are in our 18th season of the Mattapan Square Farmers Market. We are currently four months, from July through October. We serve between 200 to 400 people every Saturday at our farmers market.

But that’s not the only thing that we do. From our conversations with community residents about the things that they wanted to see to impact their lives, food access and nutrition education was one of those things, and physical activity.

And so, with our physical activity, we do have some fitness classes. Our young people are the ones that are leading bike rides. And then, we have some events that tie in physical activity and healthy eating.

In 2008, a funder wanted some young people to do a walk audit in the Mattapan community. We were able to go out and get some young people to do this walk audit. Those young people loved that activity so much that they wanted to stay and create their own group within the organization. They called themselves the “Vigorous Youth,” and that’s how our youth group got started in 2008, from young people wanting to stay, just based on that one activity that they did.

So now, we have our five focus areas of food access and nutrition education, physical activity, youth development, built environment — how can we utilize the spaces that we have for more healthy eating and physical activity? How can we utilize those green and blue spaces? — and our last focus area of community empowerment.

Our organization [was] started by a community resident. For a while, we were volunteer-based. Those who live in Mattapan and those in surrounding neighborhoods that have a similar makeup to Mattapan are also volunteering their time through those focus areas that I mentioned before and us trying to strengthen our advocacy arm so we can more formally support our residents in making the changes that they want to see when it comes to their own health.

Rath: That’s absolutely brilliant. I’m kind of floored to hear what amazing work you’re doing on so many levels. It’s all about changing health outcomes, so having been at this for a number of years now, you must have heard from people or seen people whose lives have been changed by this.

Olivier: Most definitely. And I would say, you know, when you are an organization or a nonprofit organization, you’re going out and you’re applying for grants. And then, in those grants, the funders want [to know]: How are you going to measure the success of what you do? They want the qualitative data, and they want the quantitative data.

As an organization, we are just trying to serve the people, right? The best form of information or data that I can collect is the conversations that you have with residents informally. You’re not trying to give them a survey or have them fill out a survey. This one person went to a cooking class, and now, on a scale of one to five, they know how to cook better, right?

It is those informal conversations that you’re having with residents, whether we’re having it at the farmers market and we’re just saying hello to each other and catching up on what has happened during the week, or we see them once a year at our annual Mattapan on Wheels event that our young people lead.

We see them, and we’re saying, “Hey, how’s your biking journey going? You started here with us, and now we see you here every year.” Every year, [they] come and support and learn a new bike route around the Mattapan community and how to get from point A to point B.

Those are the things that we’re not able to capture so eloquently when we’re sharing information [with] funders. But those are the things that make us feel like, “Hey, we actually made an impact.” Even if it’s just one person, and we sparked something — they don’t have to follow it — we sparked something, and we make them go, “Hmm... Maybe I will try this, or I can recommend this to my friend or my family.”

We really call that a success, and that makes us very happy.

Rath: That’s Shavel’le Olivier, executive director of the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition. You’re listening to the Joy Beat.

Rev. Curry-Avery, Susan and Shavel’le all recognize how important community is to help people find their joy. That’s why we’re celebrating their tireless work on the Joy Beat.

If you’d like to make a nomination for the Joy Beat, let us know! Leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-B-E-A-T [2328].

Joy Beat is a production of GBH and is distributed by PRX. A big thank you to all of our guests and to our team who helped make this show possible.

Kana Ruhalter produced and edited today’s episode. Jackie Martin is our senior producer. Devin Robbins is our editorial producer. Mei He is our project manager. Special thanks to David Goodman, who helped mix this episode. We had engineering support from Bill Piacitelli. Don’t forget to hit that follow button if you haven’t already to keep up with new Joy Beat episodes that drop every other Tuesday. This is the Joy Beat. I’m Arun Rath. Thanks for listening.