A Conversation with Babaluku

In our second episode, Radical Futures Now had a social distancing conversation with a Hip Hop movement builder Babaluku to deciphe the effect of Covid19 in Africa as well the creatives around the world. Silas Babaluku is the founder and executive director of The Foundation, creator of the Dynasty as well as an award-winning musician, producer, community youth activist and social entrepreneur. Being raised in Uganda and living in Canada during his late teens and early twenties has given Silas a unique and powerful perspective on how to effectively create positive and empowering global partnerships. Since 2005, Silas’ work through the Foundation has provided a platform for positive expression of thought and community building. As a part of the Bavubuka Foundation, Silas is responsible for creating Dynasty, which is an international platform that celebrates indigenous culture, socially conscious artists, and has birthed Uganda’s most popular Graphic tee movements. His work has created opportunities for youth to conceptualize, design and execute their own entrepreneurial visions with a bridge to a global audiences and markets.Silas is the founder of Back To The Source, whose vision is to grow Indigenous Hip Hop Practitioners all over the continent who are dedicated to leading their communities through the journey of reconnecting to their authentic ancestral trans formative power. He has traveled extensively promoting hip hop as a powerful tool to teach leadership, build peace and strengthen relationships. His foundation was a 2015 finalist for the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership’s Global Prize. Silas has been recognized and honored across both the African and North American continents as a musician, pioneer, social entrepreneur, youth leader and community activist.

Learn more about Bavubuka Foundations at:

Bavubuka Dynasty’s webpage and the Bvubuka Allstraz Foundation Facebook


Transcript:

Tirrea Billings:
(singing). Welcome to the Radical Zone Podcast, where we get updates on the current state of the world and how various communities are impacted from activism organizers who are out there doing the work. The Radical Zone Podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. I know you’re probably wondering what the Arcus Center is. The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership also known as ACSJL is an initiative of Kalamazoo College, whose mission is to develop and sustain leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity building. We envision a world where every person’s life is equally valued. The inherent dignity of all people is recognized. The opportunity to develop one’s full potential is available to every person and systematic discrimination and structural inequities have been eradicated. Listen to an engaging conversation with organizers and activists across the globe about social inequities that impact us all.

Rhiki Swinton:
Hi everyone. Thank you for tuning in and welcome back to the Radical Zone Podcast. It’s me, Rhiki Swinton, and I’m here today with my co-host Tirrea Billings

Tirrea Billings:
Hello everyone.

Rhiki Swinton:
So today we have a really interesting conversation ahead of us. We invited Babaluku, to discuss his work using creative arts as a transformative tool for change.

Tirrea Billings:
Silas Babaluku is the founder and executive director of the Bavubuka Foundation, creator of the Bavubuka Dynasty, as well as an award-winning musician, producer, community youth activist, and social entrepreneur. Being raised in Uganda and living in Canada during his late teens and early twenties has given Silas a unique and powerful perspective on how to effectively create positive and empowering global partnerships. Since 2005, Silas’s work through the Bavubuka Foundation has provided a platform for positive expression of thought and community building. As part of the Bavubuka Foundation, Silas is responsible for creating the Bavubuka Dynasty, which is an international platform that creates indigenous cultures, socially conscious artists, and has birth Uganda’s most popular graphic tee movements.

His work has created opportunities for youth to conceptualize design and execute their own entrepreneurial visions with a bridge to a global audience and market. Silas is the founder of Back to the Source, whose vision is to grow indigenous hip hop practitioners all over the continent who are dedicated to leading their communities through the journey of reconnecting to their authentic ancestral transformative power. He has traveled extensively promoting hip hop as a powerful tool to teach leadership, build peace and strengthen relationships. His Bavubuka Foundation was a 2015 finalists for the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Global Prize. Silas has been recognized and honored across both the African and North American continent as a musician, pioneer, social entrepreneur, youth leader, and community activist.

Rhiki Swinton:
Welcome Babaluku.

Silas Babaluku:
Thank you. Thank you.

Rhiki Swinton:
So I know you kind of live both in Canada and Uganda. So can you tell us about what is happening in both places regarding the pandemic, and then also what’s happening regarding the recent uprising due to police brutality and the killing of innocent Black individuals.

Silas Babaluku:
It’s interesting because the pandemic lockdown for me on the continent. And I had been out of the Western hemisphere for the last five months. So I’ve been here on the continent doing work when all this outbreak came out, first us the pandemic, then the protest, and then the idea now of the Black uprising for justice. But I think that it’s not incidence, a lot of this are affirmations of what our ancestors have always kept telling us that this times will come to pass when we will rise, when a generation that understands justice will take a stance to be able to speak out and be active in changing the paradigm or changing the narrative. So I think that it’s a very crucial and critical time for Black communities, not only in the Americas but everywhere, to tune in to a level of this awakening and this ancestry spirit of resilience that has now become an outcast in every community due to what was so happen to George Floyd, rest some peace.

And I think for me being on the continent, I was already in lockdown with COVID, and then to now get the George Floyd video and then tune in to an energy that rekindles memories of me growing up in the West. I’ve run a program for the last, I’m going on a seventh year, that’s called Back to the Source. I’ve always desired to find solutions on how my relatives in the diaspora can heal, or how they can find new solutions around what they’re doing in their communities to be empowered and strengthened that there’s alternatives to the suggestions that we’ll want to see in our communities.

But I think that it’s not incidence that first, we have the pandemic and then George Floyd happens, and all of a sudden you’ve got masses of people in the outside and no one is actually caring about the pandemic, but they’re now raising a higher level of something that’s more important. It goes back to that slogan of, freedom or death, you know what I’m saying? So I think that is really a beautiful time, regardless of series of deaths surrounding it and the traumatic nature of its sense, because of focal focus on the why. In this moment in time, we’re definitely are given an opportunity to treat this moment and this uprising with the power that it could offer us back as people who’ve been oppressed over time.

Rhiki Swinton:
Yeah. So I also want to ask you, so for those who don’t know, Babaluku was an emcee and a member of a hip hop group back in Uganda. So how did you go from doing that to being a community organizer and community builder?

Silas Babaluku:
There’s not a transition necessary, anyone who grows up in a hip hop culture that’s rooted in the spirit of its authenticity and truth, the equation is community. Hip hop equals community. Hip hop equals movement, hip hop equals transformation. I always tell people that hip hop is our ancestral gift to remind us of a collective nature that we have as human beings to create together. So I think that with understanding, I didn’t have to really think far, I wanted to be a genuine emcee. I wanted to understand the culture in its entirety. I never got in this to write bars or to spit a few cool lines or to just be famous, sort of get a stage. I wanted to heal, hip hop for me was a culture to heal and offer me a conversation that the world outside was not offering me.

So as a hip hop enthusiast, I started to want to understand the force and the energy of why we love the safer so much. Why we see them waste a lot of our time creating rhyme pardons or schemes to express what’s coming out of our own minds and spirits. This creative ability that is within us, that is cued and connected to the ancestral expressions. So I felt like for me, the culture was something to embody and something to not only say I do, but I live the culture, something that allowed me to learn and identify myself. And I feel like that’s the struggle for a lot of people in the hip hop culture, the identification piece. If you can’t identify yourself, then it’s hard for you to find your source.

So from just writing, I paid attention to what I was writing about. It was not just… I’ve actually never been comfortable with the commercialism of the culture. I understand its viability, but it’s never been something that takes up my mind, what I wanted to is how can I heal? Because with the oppressive nature of growing up in the West, will the therapy becomes the most essential need for you to be able to cope with the day-to-day. So I think that the culture availed me a great opportunity to seek education, to seek mentorship, to be engaged in communities that were speaking out and stand in for similar values that we shared, and to also create new solutions that we know would liberate our guy, our narratives to a higher realm of practice, and that’s today when we talk about indigenous hip hop practitioner, we are the pioneers of that narrative in Africa, because we felt like it was not enough focus to watch hip hop on television and emulate. It was important for them to authenticate and have something to offer the world.

Tirrea Billings:
Yeah. So for those of you who may not be aware, the purpose of the global prize initiative was to recognize and honor some of the most impactful social justice projects and organizations around the world. So Silas back in 2015, you were a finalist in the Arcus Center’s global prize for the Bavubuka Foundation. Was there a specific project you were working on with the foundation that was getting recognition or the foundation as a whole?

Silas Babaluku:
It was the entire vision. It was holistic in our submission, we submitted what Bavubuka was doing. So using hip hop culture to contribute to social justice in our communities, and we felt like a lot of people don’t talk about indigenous hip hop voices on the work they do on the continent. So it was important for us to engage and put this voice on the frontline. And so we have holistically approached every idea we put out in the community as something that we feel can be able to be an instrument for many people to rise. And so we’ll go from providing spaces, to provide them platforms, to provide an equipment and experiences, honoring the holistic nature of healing and providing our youth the chance and the opportunity to explore their own authenticity.

And we talk about a social justice leadership, empowering our young people who are leading, what’s at the core of our submission because all the young people, whether they’re emcees, they’re fashion designers, they’re photographers, they’re journalists, they’re dancers, they’re emcees, they all lead community. So with that energy and power or that capacity to mobilize, I think it was part of the energetics that landed us to be the finalist, because we brought authentic approaches to this hip hop culture to a platform and a stage that necessarily we wouldn’t be on if we weren’t doing the work.

Tirrea Billings:
So you talked about creating spaces and platforms for the youth to get an opportunity to express their creative expression. Can you tell us a little bit more about the process and what it was like to actually create those spaces?

Silas Babaluku:
You did mention earlier that I started as an emcee. So this is like a mad scientist move, where you know what’s working on you and you want to testify about it and then apply it, and open other people to connect to it and see if they feel it. So we started Bavubuka Allstarz. And when we started Bavubuka Allstarz, it was the idea that all youth are stars and that our job was to stand with them, so they could point out their stars and then start following up on how they want to polish their stars to shine. And so it depended on how well you polish your star, that will could point out on how beautiful it was shining. So with that analogy, the Bavubuka process was an open community space, where you brought your idea and our job was to facilitate and be mentors and those of guidance to your idea and vision. So we could see how it lives bigger and beyond you.

So there was never this idea of, I want to be a musician and all we’re focused on was just the music. No, we got into the depth of why music? Where do you see your music? What’s the purpose of this music? What are you saying in this music, just to allow you to have the why’s, the who, and what, of what you’re thinking about. And that availed us a great opportunity being that in Africa, we had so many colonial setups or NGO platforms that were crippling young people’s mindsets and not activating them. So it gave us an authentic reach to offer new narratives where these young people were now self driven, then what engaging from a point of direct impact for their community because they come from those communities. And we were breaking the dependency syndrome of them having to depend on aid for envisioning their own breakthrough or support.

So that led us to the core of them looking at being their own bosses, being entrepreneurs in their own realm and coming out with their own authentic extraction that they could take from their community and put it on market. So the experiment is definitely us engaging in the arts, but to holistically honor and create a place that dignifies, what people have dimmed not credible or what people have them lesser than, or when you’re coming from the ghetto and people look down on you, it was to allow the ghetto kings and queens to sit with those prestigious individuals that are notable in the community. So our work was to see that we’ve bridged the gap between that and that the opportunity is equal.

Tirrea Billings:
And so here in the United States, pursuing a career in the arts is usually frowned upon. And as artists, we really don’t receive a lot of support or belief that we can be successful as artists, or being an artist isn’t considered like a “real job” compared to that of a job in the STEM field or in the business field, for example. And so is that similar to the experiences you’ve had in Uganda?

Silas Babaluku:
That’s definitely similar. I think the arts in general, everywhere you go struggle due to the fact that the powers that we understand the independence that comes with being an artist, and also they understand the influence an artist creates. And if we are aware of our artistic abilities, we tend to be looked at as a threat of a freedom that could be avail to the masses. If they still figured out that they really had the power for things they didn’t have to purchase or buy, but abilities and gifts and talents that they’re inspired from within.

So I think that there’s struggle globally. I think I’ve had a lot of artists, not only here in Uganda, but in America, in Canada have the same conversation of feeling like they’re undervalued. They’re not supported and that there are no systems in place to honor their contribution. And I think that’s part of what Bavubuka is doing. We will continue doing this work until the creatives of the land are put in the position of what they contribute so that they could benefit from their healing services and how they serve this community and keep our young people inspired to be better people every day.

Tirrea Billings:
And I want to follow up with that by asking you, why is it important for you to engage youth in the creative arts and have space for them to do that?

Silas Babaluku:
I mean, arts, youth, creative, when you say all those words, they center around an ancestral responsibility that highly needs to be earned, without those key words, it’s hard to have an individual who’s community orientated. And we are a communal people, as a people. We thrive by being collectives, why ideas don’t derive out of individualism. They come out of collective formations that take care on the design and that bring wisdom and knowledges to strengthen community. So I think that as young youth, if we’re given the opportunity to identify a source, we can be a great resource to our community.

And we need to see that this message reaches every young person in a community from the age of four, five, six, seven, eight, so that they can have an idea at least that could guide their mind as they’re growing up into a space that allows them to feel like they could relate to, they could feel holistic in their expression and that they can have a liberty to offer what their gift has to offer their community. That’s one of the most powerful thing is the gifts. Our young people have a lot of gifts, but if not channeled right, that could turn into destructive gifts. So it’s important that we create platforms, conversations, ideas in a communal sense that allow everyone to look in a mirror and feel like there could be contributors in their own spaces.

Tirrea Billings:
And so I want to switch gears now and talk about the Back to the Source retreat, which is used to bring people of color in America back to Africa. And so can you talk a little bit more about what made you want to create this program and the impact that it has had on the individuals who have participated.

Silas Babaluku:
Now, as a young African who migrated to Canada at the age of 12, I say, I have shared a load with my African-American brothers, with my African-Canadian brothers, with my diaspora Black people, because as any Black person knows, when you migrate to the diaspora, you tend to lose the sense of, I’m from Uganda. I’m from Senegal, I’m from Nigeria, you become Black. You join the undercurrent of how people have seen Black people in that country or in that space. So I think having that experience and knowing how the suffering that we bear as Black men and Black women growing up in the diaspora has not gained ways to feel heard or expressed, or feel like we have even spaces where we could heal and be confident, and feel like someone is listening. I think within my hip hop space, I was longing to find a solution that could collectively give us a conversation out of the plantation, because it don’t matter how much we talked on the plantation. If we don’t shift the paradigm to move our conversation in a different energy, I felt like we’re always fighting similar struggles on different days.

And so being that I was working on a continent and I was already infused in communities and using hip hop culture. I hosted a relative from Washington, Seattle, with a white ally brother Scott Macklin and brother Jonathan Cunningham. And they came and we had a workshop that was called the art of indigenous hip hop storytelling. Now, part of that, we had to travel to the social denial. And when we traveled to the social denial, they looked at us and they say, “You are the people or the source.” Have you ever imagined the influence and an impact you could make if your time into that narrative of reclaim it. And that left me thinking as a practitioner, as someone who’s open to wisdom and knowledge, when it flows, I went home and I started to tell myself, this is it. I want to create a gift. And this gift has to honor the knowledges that we’ve lost over time.

And the idea that we haven’t had a chance to convene as indigenous Black folk on the continent and indigenous Black folk in the Americas. We now need to create a space where we could come together and have conversations. And this conversation should honor our journeys. And they should give us an idea that in this conversations we find healing, in this conversations we’ll reclaim our space, in this conversation we are guided to find new ways to traverse our challenges in the West. And at the same time, we open up to new ideas on how we could stand in solidarity with our relatives on the continent. So Back to the Source, came out of the idea that we wanted to honor the message of Marcus Garvey, who said repatriation is a must.

And while I’m in Canada in Vancouver, I’m thinking about, this brothers say this, God knows how many years ago. And I feel like we haven’t listened. There’s a reason why he was echoing that message and that truth. Why was it important for Black people in the Americas to repatriate, even if it was just for a minute to get off the plantation and remember, and recollect a memory or recollect a story, connect to something brand new, you owe it yourself to honor that, just because you’re born in the American soil, it doesn’t mean that your DNA is restricted to that land. So in the message of Marcus Garvey saying that repatriation is a must. We went ahead to say, if we did not listen when he said that it is much more feeling like in this day in time, reconnection is a must because we are disconnected generation.

We are losing ourselves. We are getting killed. We have no anyone running to our rescue due to the fact that we got disconnected systematically on all levels. And that if you wanted a free on top into a new freedom and liberty as human beings, we had to start embarking on a quest to reconnect to our source. Now, whether it was spiritually or physically, the idea that you want to die reconnecting, sounded liberating versus on the idea of feeling disconnected and having nowhere to go. So Back to the Source in its entirety, inspired by the culture of hip hop, it was to celebrate the lost indigenous wisdom and also be a welcoming space for our desperate family to center their knowledge and wisdom and relate to the relatives on the continent. So we could grow as strong a voice as a people to heal ourselves.

Rhiki Swinton:
So when thinking about the work that you do with Back to the Source, getting people from other places to come and participate in this retreat, and also thinking about how you work with use, to develop their entrepreneurial skills and get them thinking about a global market. So when taking that into mind, can you answer the question of, why is it so important to have a transnational lens when doing this type of work?

Silas Babaluku:
So part of the problem with Africa has been information. A lot of young people are I left behind due to lack of information. And that means that they’re not open a global platform to be up to date with what’s happening currently right now in Michigan. And there’s a problem in that. I should be able to be on a par with the information happening right now where you are, you know what I mean? On the same level, so we growing together, not me being behind a 10 or 20 or 50 years behind while you are advancing. So a part of that need to talk global narratives or to talk global ideologies comes from a lot of internal work, whereby you feel like locally, you always marginalized. And then globally, when you create allies, you’re strengthened because you could fly on the wings of your allies.

So it was important for young Black people who are locked in a dependency syndrome on NGOs and various government institutions to find a new way where they could fly, just like we did it. For us to be labeled as legendary and pioneer for hip hop culture, we had to seek global allyship to give us platforms. When we made it to Hollywood and people were like, you rapping in your language, you got an award winning documentary in Hollywood, man, that means you doing it big. So we got embraced locally when we came off because of once again, the Western conditioning that everything that is good and that has value has to affiliate with the colonizers setups to get credit. So in this work, now, we’re trying to make sure that Africa plays a frontline and reclaiming this narrative that you got to affiliate to Africa to be dope, and that we are the source and that when you come to the source, the magic that happens here has an infinite power for all of us to grow. Not only the Africans, but our global indigenous relatives.

And so global, that’s why we running a hip hop gathering called the B-Global Indigenous Hip Hop Gatherings. We are understanding that in these affirmations, we are breaking the boundaries and the margins on the information. And now we could transmit our conversations together and come out with different new knowledges that could support our communities both locally and internationally. So the power to globalize our narrative is a strategy to make sure the young people know to seek information to be on a standard, and that allows them to participate in global dialogue. Let’s be on a frontline line. Let’s not just talk about the village.

Tirrea Billings:
So what is your life philosophy?

Silas Babaluku:
Rooted. Everything rooted. Back to the Source, I think, embodies my life philosophy. As a child of the continent who grew up in the West. And I’ve been blessed to have that opportunity to return, not only to say that I’ve return for family, but for my own individual healing to tune in to the voices of my ancestral narratives. Whether it’s medicine, whether it’s music, whether it’s song, whether it’s poetry, whether it’s art, to honor the greatness and the beauty that’s in everything that defines me. I think for me, it’s the message is that when we are here, we must always remember that we are not alone. We are representation of those that came before us and they live through our works. They live through our ideas, they live through our thought pardons. They manifest to the greatness that we all bear and carry.

So we must be attuned to that message. So we can allow ourselves to be human beings, because if we’re being killed, if we are struggling, talking about racism right now, I don’t want to die as that’s my frontier battlefront. I want to die knowing I was a human being who lived with certain philosophies, who served my people and who stood my ground to be equal with any human and soul on this planet. That’s why I talk about indigenousness. Because you have a lot of Black talking about, decolonize your mind. What happens after you decolonize, what are you going to stay on a plantation?

And if you have an understanding that the system was not designed on based on you being dignified, then you’re restricting your mind to the systematic way of thinking. And the only way we untie ourselves from the systemic oppression is by making a choice to reconnect, making a choice to explore our indigenousness, not even our blackness, because our blackness is a layer to creative brand that defines us in the West. When I’m in Africa, they don’t call me Black. I come from a tribe. I go by the clans, you know what I mean? My honor here is by my clan not by my color.

So you get to understand that there’s so much lost in our narratives. And if we could honor ourselves and respect our ancestors and choose to journey, to remember, the point remember to remember, for without them, we would not encounter the beauty that we celebrate today. Regardless of the pain we have carried over their struggles. I feel like the message is to lead and guide and promote rootedness, for when we root ourselves, we will once again, find a foundation to stand as a dignified people, regardless of where we’re placed on the map. So Back to the Source is my philosophy. Indigenizing is my way of achieving that. Honoring your ancestors is my way of saying you have magical powers to allow them and be a witness on how they work on your behalf.

Because let’s agree, we on this podcast and I’m talking to brilliant young people from different parts of the world. And at the end of the day, we are a representation of a beautiful act that all of us had no say in the making of it. How you became a journalist, how I became a leader, how they became a fashion design. I had no say in that, but the answers to say, that would be your gift. And you’ll use it and it will guide you. It will lead you. It will bring you people. It will resource you. It will find a way to be in conversation with you so you can find your way home. Because see if I didn’t have music, I would have not found my way home. You see music, hip hop led me back to Africa.

So I honor the culture and everything I do, whether I’m in a corporate boardroom, whether I’m in a hospital, whether I’m in a church, whether I’m in a farm, everything I do, I have to honor the spirit in which I was guided home. So I think that the philosophy is to tune in to our rooted ideas and embrace the philosophy of reconnection and accept that we are a disconnected people that need to heal ourselves to the process of reconnecting.

Rhiki Swinton:
Okay. And lastly, we just want to ask, how can the rest of the rest of the world get involved or support the work that you do?

Silas Babaluku:
That’s a very great question. I always love when people say, how do we support the work? The work starts with you. If you’re out there doing powerful work in your community, you’re doing the work we’re doing and you’re supporting us. For me, that’s paramount that individuals remotely in our own communities are tuned in to an energy of healing their own communities. And when you find that you’re healing your own community, our shared values will guide you to really understand a service that you could render beyond your community, because you could relate in your practices. So we’re looking for people who honor the messages that I have shared and who are on a quest to build with Africa. And not to tie into the narratives of the past, but to participate in the new design that allow us to meet the freedom, when we talk about liberation for Africa.

So you could support us in this liberation work on a frontier, by you, yourself, engaging in your own community and having healing circles and learning circles that allow our young people to learn about Africa and its importance in their lives. And also, how does young people have a magical and top resource from their ancestral lineage that we need to teach them about so they can activate and use it to power forward. And then we then invite you to come to Africa to join us on the land. So we could physically move to some energetics that could given us the opportunity to celebrate each other’s stories, set up with each other’s journey through our Back to the Source leadership retreat. We love to say that we want to encourage as many people as we can to connect with the land and have that healing sense and feeling that could cue them into their powerful superpower space to traverse this universe knowing that they are here to live holistically, living out their assignments and offering what they have to the universe in the most authentic and genuine way they can.

And for you to do all that is to be tuned into this medicine that we’re talking about, self healing, narrative medicine, where we could honor the idea that we take responsibility for what’s happening to us. And that we are standing up to do something about it, whether it’s music, whether it’s fashion, whether it’s photography, whether it’s journalism, whether it’s entrepreneurship, tech, farming, medicine, name it, add it to the list. We invite all this practices, lawyers, doctors, to come to the continent. We will host you, we’ll push you into a place or a community where we feel that you could be able to impact not only the community, but your own story, to find that awakening that derives you to attach yourself to the assignment necessary to lead your vision, your purpose, to a place where you feel like you’ve lived here, having told your story and celebrated beyond any local margins that restrict your ideas and understand it.

But people are always welcome to hit us up at Bavubuka the Facebook page. So we have a Facebook page, Bavubuka Allstarz Foundation. And I think we’ll share the links. On Instagram, it’s Bavubuka, and Bavubuka is @bavubuka, Instagram, you can hit us up on there. We’re still working on our website for this new conversation that’s happening because we thought elevated. But the most powerful way we really want people to stand with us is in the legacy work. The legacy work that we’re doing, we’ve been doing this work for 14 years and participating in hip hop culture for 17 years. And as we moved towards a 20th mark, we’ll want to stand with influencers and powerful individuals to continue the vision of providing safe spaces for our communities to build visions for their authentic local environments, forward together.

And we want to honor that because we feel like libraries are not in Africa, museums are not here in Africa. Our young people don’t have inspirational walls. We don’t have a place where thought pardons could be shaped into greatness. So we want to honor that outreach of being able to be advocates for providing such spaces. So talk to Bavubuka, hit us up, call us, reach out, and we’ll definitely guide you in the best way you could be suitable to support the work, but be blessed. And we’re grateful to always participate on the frontline.

Tirrea Billings:
Awesome. Thank you so much for speaking with us today, Silas. That’s all we have for today. Please join us next time on the Radical Zone Podcast.

Rhiki Swinton:
Thank you all for tuning in to the Radical Zone Podcast, where we center radical thinkers and their ideas. See you next time.

Tirrea Billings:
Thank you for tuning in, be sure to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on social media. You can find us on Facebook at ACSJLKzoo, Twitter @ACSJL and Instagram @arcuscenter. For questions, comments, and ideas for future topics. Please leave responses on our social media platforms.