We caught up with the brilliant and insightful THE CINCINNATI PEACE MOVEMENT a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
THE CINCINNATI, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.
We at The Cincinnati Peace Movement found our purpose through adversity. We mainly grew up during a rough period in time in the early 2000’s and also a rough neighborhood in Downtown/OTR/Westend. But our background is also what lead us to wanting to serve and make changes, or better yet be a part of the change.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
At the moment CPM’s focus is our new “I Can Literacy Program”. For the last year we’ve been able to provide tutoring to school aged children, mentor opportunities for teen lead groups and inspiring the youth to accel at academic activities. And we’re pleased to say that thanks to the United Way Black Empowerment Grant we will be able to continue this initiative and expand into more schools. We’ve added more components to our business as well with our new children’s books series. The main focus for this book series is to provide kids with content and literature that they can relate to in a more intrinsic way. What we’re most excited about with this project and more specifically this year is now we plan to bring our teen lead groups in on our creative process with the creation of our books to ensure that we can truly capture the youth’s perspective. Please be on the lookout for our first book to print this fall!
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Overall when it comes to starting a business or going into any industry the advice we would give would be to fall in love with the process of things. Starting off we had a lot of goals and a vision for how we viewed ourselves and where we ultimately wanted to end up. But what we didn’t know was what it would take along the way to completing this vision. Taking into account hardship, failures, mistakes and just flat out dropping the ball sometimes it’s always equally important to respond positively. And so we learn its okay to make mistakes along the way so long as we don’t waste a mistake. We look back on our process a lot just to see how far we’ve come and of course we have things we wish we could do differently but adversely we have an immense amount of moments where we did things the right way. Being where we are we realize we wouldn’t be here without all of it and so we’ve just learned to fall in love with the process. Because when you finally win it will be more than every loss.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
As an organization and a family we have certain values amongst one another. And one of those is an African ideology and a book called “Ubuntu”. And it means “I am because you are”. In this book it goes into depth about the collective mindset that this word brings about and its something we implement in the work that we do and the way we treat each other. Its very similar to the saying “when one wins we all win” in the sense that it humbles the individualism to an extent and allows unity to be at the forefront of how we operate. We started CPM together the three of us (Asad, Josh and Shalom) and quite literally none of us would be what we are to one another without one of the other. Maybe we each would have individually done something similar on our own in another life but it would not have been we have now. So Ubuntu to us means to appreciate just how connected we all really are and to never forget just how much we can do together.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://cincypeace-movement.com/
- Instagram: Cincypeace_513
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/cincypeace513/
- Linkedin: N/A
- Twitter: N/A
Image Credits
Brandon Issac
