When she joined the LearnServe Fellows Program in 2018, Jayme’ Mims had a plan to tackle food insecurity in her neighborhood in Washington, DC’s Ward 8. But when she shared her ideas for a food drive with her neighbors, they raised concerns. Police violence and other gun violence made it safer to stay indoors as much as possible.
Looking at these connected, overlapping injustices, Jayme’ decided to change her plans. She launched JCEP (Justice Community Equity Peace) to give her friends and peers a safe platform to share their experiences and perspectives with police officers.
In this interview with Jayme’ from 2018, she shares her story in founding JCEP as a LearnServe Fellow, her experiences in Paraguay with LearnServe Abroad, and how the two are linked.
Jayme’ has stayed close with the LearnServe community since heading to Hood College in Frederick, MD last fall. Most recently, she served as an intern with LearnServe’s new Summer Global Fellowship, a month-long virtual social entrepreneurship exchange with students from Washington, DC and Lusaka, Zambia.
Emma Strother, LearnServe Development Manager and alumna, spoke with Jayme’ in depth last week about her work and approach to social change. We are honored to share a portion of that conversation here. (Note to readers that this interview delves into the topic of police violence.)
Emma: As you’re watching this interview you gave two years ago, is there anything you want to say now on what you were thinking about when you launched JCEP?
Jayme’: JCEP was an acronym for Justice, Community, Equity, and Peace that I started with LearnServe my Senior year of high school. When it came about, I was trying to provide food for my community actually because we live in a food desert. And it all boiled down to the community feeling unsafe in our own neighborhood due to gun violence and police brutality. At the time, police brutality was present, but it wasn’t world-widely shown, it wasn’t globally publicized as much as it is right now.
So there was discomfort, and particular officers might give police a bad image in the community. And there was just so much negativity around the concept of trying to get the police and the community together, whether to start a food drive or just talk. So that sparked JCEP. Trying to come to common ground with the youth in my school and the MPD officers who patrolled our school. To try to figure out why there’s no bridge there, more of a gap. And the hostility was what sparked JCEP. Because neutral ground and common ground is the only way that we can move forward and try to bridge the gap between the stereotypes of officers and how Black people are living their lives. So yeah, that was how JCEP came about.
Emma: When you were getting started and talking to your peers about your idea, did any of their thoughts surprise you?
Jayme’: Well, I wouldn’t say it surprised me because there were already negative relations to even speaking with officers, so people were very reluctant. It was like, “oh no, I don’t want them to try and make me feel like I’m doing something wrong.” They were saying they don’t want the police to manipulate them into feeling guilty about their actions or their needs in life.
And there was some peers who were ok with it. So I considered that surprising, they were like “yeah, we don’t mind, you know speaking with them from our perspective why we feel uncomfortable around officers.” That part surprised me, and it also surprised me to see them say they were willing to participate if we were to have events. Because some people were uncomfortable, and are uncomfortable with MPD to this day.
Emma: Did anything surprise you about the police officers you were engaging with through your venture?
Jayme’: Yeah, I interviewed two officers who were actually from Washington, DC Ward 8 members. So that was kind of surprising that they actually came from my neighborhood and they became officers themselves. Also, to have them say that they don’t like the stereotypes that officers create about members of the community because they’re from the community too was interesting. So it was like, wow you also feel some type of way about the violence and how it’s portrayed to the media — stereotypes about how Black people are. And to see that two members of Ward 8 came from Ward 8 and became officers was surprising.
And they were willing to participate in having a sit down with some students who were also willing to participate. So that was surprising as well, because they weren’t like “oh no, we don’t want to talk with kids outside of our uniform,” but they would take me up on my idea.
It was a lot, but I learned how to do it, in the sense of how you interview someone when you’re uncomfortable with them and the job they have.
You know, they were officers so I was uncomfortable interviewing officers, but then I had to realize that they’re people too. I don’t want someone to portray a negative ideology onto me being an African American woman. So I put myself in their shoes, but also said to them “how would you feel if someone came in here being discriminatory towards you?”
Emma: With everything that is being highlighted right now through the resurgence of the global movement for Black Lives Matter, do you see the type of work that you were doing through JCEP being a part of the conversation?
Jayme’: That’s a really complex question to answer. So the Black Lives Matter movement is really eye-opening for some people because it brings awareness to the fact that these injustices haven’t just recently started within the last couple of years. They started a long time before the Civil Rights Movement when slaves were first brought here against their will. So just to let you know, Black people have been fighting for their rights since the beginning of time.
And it just also shows how, if someone’s in a specific area, you’re not always exposed to the things that are going on outside of your community. You only know what you’re exposed to. If you’re not aware of the injustices going on around the world, then you’ll be naive to certain things. And I think that’s why the Black Lives Matter movement is important because it’s educating people who didn’t know — or didn’t take into consideration before — that as Black people, we don’t have the same rights as a white person would have when it comes to contact with police officers. We fear for our lives in the presence of police officers.
And we don’t know the ideal outcome of any encounter with an officer of the law because our only weapon is our video camera. That’s the only way we have to defend ourselves, but even if you are recording some don’t care. The system is against us. So we need to dismantle the system.
I think that, once we get everyone on the same page showing that violence isn’t the answer, we can then come to a common ground of dismantling systems that are used to oppress Black and Brown communities. There’s a lot that plays into it because it’s not just a simple answer like defund the police and it’ll stop. It sinks deeper than defunding the police what has to take place. I don’t know how to give a simple or straightforward answer to that question because it’s so deep and it’s so emotional.
It’s really complicated because I know for a fact that in other countries you can live with sanity and peace, in the sense that their officers don’t even carry weapons or they don’t shoot to kill. Not every officer is corrupt or bad or willing to take a life, but it’s just a lot, honestly it’s really a lot. And if JCEP can play a role, it’s about letting people know that Ward 8 is a community at the end of the day. We are all US citizens and this is our country. And the only way to fix our country is to understand each other. The officers need to understand us for us to understand them.
And the violence and the disruptiveness that plays out into everything that’s going on isn’t the answer. Those in power need to educate themselves about how Black people have been feeling for over 400 years. So yeah, I’m glad to see that there are white people who are participating in the protest, and seeing that change needs to come. And it’s just like, if people can bring about change together then we will bring about change, whether change wants to come or not.
It’s crazy because when I tell people at school that I live in DC, they’re like “you live with all the monuments?” And I’m like “I wish, no, I live across the river, I live on the other side of the bridge.” I live on the side where we don’t get a lot of positive media coverage. And now that they’re gentrifying Wards 7 and 8, it’s like we don’t have the chance to fix our community because they’re taking our community away from us. And the gun violence has taken our community away from us as well. People don’t feel safe, so they’re leaving on their own. In ten years I wonder what my neighborhood will look like. Will it look like Wards 1, 2, and 3? Or will it look like the Ward I grew up in?
So I also take that into consideration when I think about what change means for Black people. Because change can also be about changing the environment we grew up in, for it not to even look like it did before. So it’s hard, but it’s hard in a good way in a sense because it’s hard to the point where you can’t give up. It’s hard to the point where you’ve got to figure it out. You’ve got to keep going. You’ve got to try to understand the other side as well because it’s no one’s fault that they were brought up in a different environment.
I don’t blame another student that’s my age who grew up in Ward 1. It’s not their fault that they didn’t have to go through the struggle. But the intergenerational help that they had, we weren’t given the same opportunity. It’s the system’s fault. It’s the way the system doesn’t fairly treat people of color and Black people.
So yeah, what they can do in Ward 1 is provide me a platform where I can speak my concerns to their community. And a lot of people have done that for me. A lot of people who live in Wards outside 7 and 8 have been like “ok, I know I live in a good community, but there are good communities in Wards 7 and 8 that don’t get the same opportunities I do because of how they’re covered in the media.”
Emma: Thank you for sharing all of this with me, and with the folks reading our interview. Would you please tell us a little bit about where you’re planning to take your social change work from here?
Jayme’: I currently attend Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. And I was given the opportunity to become Freshman Rep for the Black Student Union last year. So that was pretty amazing. We have a well organized, well put together, diversity coalition at Hood College for the Latino students, the Black students, the African Student Union, others, so that was pretty amazing.
I’m currently a double major. I major in Spanish and Criminal Justice. I picked those two majors specifically because when I become a public defense attorney I want to be able to not only help Black people, but also be able to help in Latino communities. I want to be a public defense attorney for people of color communities that don’t have access to lawyers. So that’s where criminal justice comes into play as well.
Criminal justice also gives me an insight on the law for when I start my nonprofit. Hopefully in the next two and a half years I’ll be going to law school. Through it I’ll be keeping my nonprofit JCEP in mind. Maybe one of the programs that can come from me defending youth would be that they join JCEP and get the chance to say what they experience to officers.
JCEP started two years ago, and I think it’ll continue forever, I’ll keep pushing it as far as I can. Just starting is the main point. You don’t have to finish, and the change doesn’t have to be perfect, but you have to give it some guidance and some form of shaping to keep it going.