In 2023, Jacqueline Hale was a junior at Innovations High School. Her attendance was spotty, and her motivation was dragging.
“I just wasn’t really showing up and completing the things I needed to do,” she said.
On Wednesdays, Innovations students can opt for off-campus work experiences. When Donald Griffin from Black Wall Street—the Reno nonprofit that provides a range of resources for Black and underserved communities—came to the school to talk with Jacqueline’s class, she was happy to follow him off-campus to the group’s office, where she helped distribute household goods to people who needed them.
“Sometimes I would organize the diaper pantry for all the babies, and sometimes I would help people carry food boxes to their cars, just a lot of different stuff that helped,” Hale said.
She admitted she’d dreaded community service opportunities in the past. This time, she said, it made her feel warm inside.
A chance meeting and a fledgling aid group
Back in 2020, Griffin was working with the Downtown Reno Partnership as an ambassador; they’re the people in blue polo shirts who offer directions to tourists and guide people who are unhoused to various services.
“I was helping people into facilities—dry-out facilities,” he said.
A man he met at a gym, RoMar Tolliver, had been motivated by the activist momentum he saw swelling in the Black community in the months after George Floyd was killed. Toliver wanted to start a youth-literacy organization, in part to expose young people to texts demonstrating that Black history starts well before American slavery. He invited Griffin to join him.
They rented a basement space in a modest office complex and launched Black Wall Street. The mission expanded quickly, and today, five years in, the group has in-house diaper and food banks, and a Saturday drop-in program for kids, offering chess, checkers and mentorship. Black Wall Street delivers food to apartment complexes, distributes bikes to kids, and works with Wake Up Nevada, the opioid-overdose prevention group, to keep several boxes around town filled with harm-reduction supplies.
“I dealt with addiction for over 23 years,” Griffin said, adding that, when he was a teen, “Nobody ever took the time out to come to the schools and talk to us.”
To Griffin and Tolliver, the two most important things Black Wall Street offers are role models, and a pathway for kids to become role models. With that in mind, they expanded the Innovations students’ volunteer hours into a mentorship program wherein the teens provide guidance for younger kids.
Hale was one of that program’s first participants. At a middle school, she and her peers gave out backpacks and sometimes food bags, occasionally took on hall-monitor duties, and spent time with the younger students during lunch and recess—“just to make sure they have friends throughout the day,” Hale said. “My goal was to be kind of a big sibling and to encourage the kids.”
She prodded her charges to get to class on time instead of lingering in the bathroom. “I would tell them that I used to do that stuff, too,” she said.
She figures her honesty made her a trustworthy mentor, rather than just an authority figure. She said she was following Griffin’s lead.
Said Griffin: “I always introduce myself (in high schools) as, ‘Donald, alcoholic, addict and former criminal. And once I go in there, and I share my story, they understand: ‘Hey, he’s not just talking behind the book. He’s actually had some life experience that’s involved.’ … And then I sit back, and I listen. Nine times out of 10, the children, they come up to me: ‘Hey, you know, I understood that; that resonated with me.’”
Hale said Griffin came across as “a really cool and giving, kind person. He was just really nice. No matter your background, no matter what you came and presented him with, he always tried to help you. He never judged you. He just understood the low-income and the minorities of the community, and he sees them when probably no one else really does. … Even if he doesn’t know their families, he’ll just be like, ‘How’s your mom?’”
Hale said the sense of accomplishment she got from distributing necessities and mentoring middle schoolers affected her quickly.
“Once I started feeling the responsibility of trying to help other kids … stick to school and try to convince them that school is a good thing, it also convinced me that I need to play my part and show them what it is to go to school,” she said.
When Hale was still a junior, she decided she wanted to be a social worker. She started attending class more often and raised her GPA. Now, at 19, she’s a social-work student at Truckee Meadows Community College.
A goal to grow
On a late January day, Griffin stood in the Black Wall Street office amid tables of cardboard boxes containing produce, bread and treats from FoodMaxx and Trader Joe’s. Wire shelves held diapers and assorted household goods—a toaster, a thermostat, a pair of children’s boots—donated from Walmart. The goods on offer spilled out into the hallway, where a clothing rack displayed T-shirts to give away.
Griffin said that Black Wall Street served somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 people last year, and that today, the group’s most pressing goal is to expand. They’re looking at purchasing a building with a loading dock, which would allow them to distribute food in larger quantities.