Impacting the community
As Restore OKC staff have asked interns to brainstorm how to provide food sources for thousands of community members to walk or bike to, Miller says it's been inspiring to watch the students expand their vision for the community and themselves. Interns like Hammon provide fresh perspective on how to accomplish the organization’s mission, and the students have also been open and honest in their conversations about the racism and racial injustice they’ve experienced firsthand. “The more I’ve gotten to know them, it’s impossible for me to ever be apathetic,” said Miller. “We’ve had conversations with them about how we can try to love others well, what they can do to start to turn the tide and when to enter in to those hard conversations. But a lot of the impetus has to be on the white community to wake up to [racism].” Hammon is hopeful that his generation can lead the community toward racial reconciliation, encouraging people to come
together and marginalized voices to be heard, but he doesn’t believe it’s possible to end racism entirely.
“I was introduced to many different types of people and different opinions, and my point of view changed from getting the opportunity to learn from and talk to people about their everyday lives and things they [wish] were different,” said Hammon. “My train of thought would have never changed if I was never put in that situation. That was a good opportunity for me. To be a leader, you have to listen to others and their opinions.” In his time with Restore OKC, Hammon has led with the same mentality, getting to know his fellow interns’ skills and passions so they can work more effectively as a team and make a positive, lifelong impact on the community they serve. “These interns are awesome and they 100 percent are going to change our future and our world,” said Miller. “We’re just getting to be instruments that come alongside them. Keymonti has been so fun to watch, see him grow and see his horizons begin to expand.”
“To be a leader, you have to listen to others and their opinions.”
In true leader fashion, though, Hammon is willing to do his part, examine his own biases and pave the way for others to understand those who are different. Until the previous school year, Hammon says Northeast High School students were predominantly Black. That changed when Northeast and Classen SAS merged.
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