Aja Brown Quotes

It is the local community that needs to own the commitment to education.

You know there's problems - you can see all the poverty and so on - but it's quite another matter to know what you can do about it.

As a Brooklynite, this borough holds a special place in my heart, and I'm excited to represent BSE Global and identify opportunities that elevate our community to new heights.

Baltimore obviously has a lot of problems, but there are people there that have a lot of promise.

While many applauded Oprah for opening her heart to young girls in South Africa, some criticized her for not investing in the youth of America.

We must do more to protect our neighborhoods and give integrity to our community plans.

Look at any country that's plagued with poverty, disease or violence; the antidote is girls. Girls are the antibodies to many of society's ills.

The other aspect is that you become much more aware of the structural problems that pertain to that continent. You feel the need to act to try and solve them.

Most organizations should be pro-active, but philanthropists concerned with poverty should deliberately be reactive, learning from the efforts of ordinary folks who tired of looking the other way as their communities fell apart.

By bringing the voices of the ordinary people faced with extraordinary challenges to television screens around the world, I hope to affect change in one community at a time.

I think that my peers deserve more than products to buy wrapped up in advertising. We need ideas to share and causes to believe in - opportunities to lead and teach.

As a girl who was raised on the idea that we should give back to our community as much as possible, I believe that we have more power than we think when it comes to making change.

The number one issue facing cities isn’t crimes or jobs anymore, it’s public education.

It is not enough to teach our young people to be successful...so they can realize their ambitions, so they can earn good livings, so they can accumulate the material things that this society bestows. Those are worthwhile goals. But it is not enough to progress as individuals while our friends and neighbors are left behind

My music reflects my strong belief in equal opportunities for all - specifically young girls and women. Many, many children do not have anywhere near the opportunities that we kids did in my community - great schools, public safety, etc.

The main objective - our soul is our people. And our job is to enrich their lives, change the world. And so I think that's the bigger pressure you put on yourself.

Newark faces real challenges.

Public service and community organizing and movement building is such a part of my DNA that it's really hard to separate it.

We look at every project as a way to connect with our community and ask ourselves if it will entertain and empower them.

The Kind Foundation was created to scale our social impact and be able to deepen our focus on fostering empathy and developing kinder communities.

I'm a teacher, so much of what I'm doing remains in the abstract. But I also support a lot of educational initiatives that support kids to really get out there and work hard in their communities. But I also think that we need poets in our country to inspire.

We've got to help our community out. We've got to help Baltimore out, because it's a lot of things that have been handed down in our society that we're dealing with.

When things happen socially in our community, as artists, we've got the right to exercise our voices if we choose to, use our powers for good.

You can't raise the aspirations of a child and then leave them hanging. Poverty can't be solved by a project. It's solved by a relationship, collaboration.

After I returned from Oxford, I spent 5-6 years in a village in Madhya Pradesh - 25 km. outside Bhopal - along with a group of people working with the communities. But, over time, we realised that there were just too many constraints, and for ordinary citizens to be the change agent was not that easy.