Transcription of Pious Ali for the show Intercultural Understanding #241
Lisa: Our next guest is well known within the community and an individual that I’ve been interested in talking to for quite some time. This is Pious Ali, who is a youth and community engagement specialist in the Muskie School of Public Service, where he is working on a project called Portland Empowered. Pious has spent the better part of his career focusing on engaging youth and creating dialogue across cultural, ethnic, socio-economic, and faith-based groups. He is the founder and executive director of the Maine Interfaith Alliance. He is the co-director and co-founder of King Fellows, a Portland-based youth group dedicated to creating meaningful opportunities for youth leadership and civic engagement based on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Pious is a member of the Portland’s Board of Education and he is the first African-born American and Muslim to be elected to a public office in Maine. Thanks for coming in today.
Pious: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: It is really a great honor for us to have you, because you do a lot of things. You’re in a lot of places. You work very hard. You’ve spent a lot of time doing the things that you feel passionate about.
Pious: I do my best.
Lisa: Well, tell me about your background. What was it about your family and the way that you were raised and your education that caused you to become so interested in these topics?
Pious: That’s interesting because yes, the way I was raised but not necessarily my education or professional background. I was raised in a household where my family, which is my mother’s family, my grandfather and his brothers and cousins have a house where other people bring their kids to come and live with us. It’s a madrasa, which means a place that young people learn how to, it’s like a Sunday School but goes on throughout the week, where kids learn how to read a Quran, the Muslim holy book, learn how to write and a couple of other things religiously and culturally.
I grew up in my own household where we share it with kids coming from the community. That is how I was raised. I went to a regular school, public school back in Ghana. When I graduated from high school I took classes in then they call it, it’s like a journalism school, but I specifically did photojournalism. I work with newspapers and magazines and did a couple of photographs for many different entities back in Ghana before I migrated here. I did live in New York for two years and then I came to Maine.
Since I’ve been to Maine I work with young people. I talk to people that I stumble on the job. I wasn’t looking to save any or create anything for anybody. I was looking for a job like any other immigrant out there. I was looking for a job. I would make a buck, take care of my then wife and son. Then one thing led to the other. I learned so much from the young people that I work with. I have funny story that I share with people. I used to work for a program.
My very first job with young people was with an organization then called People Original Opportunity Program. They had this program called Peer Leader, as in peer and leader. When I first applied for the job, I didn’t get it, because I didn’t have a background in social work and I didn’t have a degree in social work. Someone else was hired. The person happened to be the second on the list of many applicants after a series of interviews. I didn’t get the job and I think a month and a half or two months down the road, the person who was hired left, because she had a job somewhere that was paying more or that is more what she wanted to do than what this job was. I got called back by the director of the program. She called my home number and left a message and said, “Hey, if you are still interested in that job, call me back.”
I called back. The story is, I just give this background so you know where I was coming from. My first time at the job was at Riverton Park. The young people that I was going to work with, most of whom are immigrants like me, some of them are from Africa, some of them from different part of the world. I took it on myself thinking that this is going to be an easy job. These kids will have the same background. Some of them are Muslims. It goes on and on. The similarities are bigger than the non-similarities between me and this group of young people.
I would be sitting in the corner and nobody would talk to me. The initial connection was not there, because I didn’t have any idea what I was in. I’m a people person, but I have not worked with any young people. I was there for a few weeks and then I started connecting with these young people. Also I was coming from the background which was culturally conservative from how I was raised. I was looking at these young people when I speak. No one speaks. I’m the adult in the room, but after my weird interaction with them where they’re like, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I learned.
They forced me. I watched my colleague. I was working with someone. I watched the way she engaged them. I step back and look at the way I was engaging these young people. They forced me to do self reflection, look at the way I do things and learn that, no, the way I was raised is quite different from how you engage young people here. The basic principles of raising young people and working with young people are the same, by the way you engage is a little bit different.
That was my first baptism, is that’s a word to use, into working with young people. Since then, I’ve made it a point to learn as much as I can when I’m working with young people because they have a lot to share. Most of the time us adults don’t look for that piece. We want them to just listen to us and do what we say they should do.
Lisa: Tell me about the King Fellows program, the program that you co-founded with Rachel Talbot Ross.
Pious: The King Fellows Program is a program for young high school students of color from greater Portland. About 85 percent of them are from Portland, but some of them are from South Portland. A few of them are from Westbrook and similarly about 95 or 98 percent of them are all students in public schools, but because some are from South Portland they go to school in South Portland or one or two go to private schools here in Portland. It came about when I think it was about 2010 or 2011 during the Martin Luther King weekend holidays. The NAACP have a group of youth and the Maine Interfaith Youth Alliance have a group of youth. I’ve done some work with Seeds of Peace, still part of what we call the greater Seeds of Peace family.
We have students from the Seas of Peace group. They’re in the Martin Luther King holiday. These kids and some other kids who are not part of anything will come together and do projects. They’re in this project. We call them King Fellows. It was becoming a little bit too all over the place and we wanted to contain it and turn it into an actual youth group, so that when they come there’s no “I’m this, I’m that.” It could be more of a structured program where young people can be part of it and have this solid vision and goal.
Lisa: You also do work with Portland Empowered through the Muskie School.
Pious: Right.
Lisa: You’re doing something slightly different there.
Pious: Right. Portland Empowered is a project that is funded by Nellie Mae Education Foundation, which is I think the largest private education foundation in New England. The program is a school form program. Basically, what we do is we work with parents who are coming from what we call marginalized background. Parents who do not for whatever reason normally engage the school districts either because the school districts have challenges in how to engage them or they don’t understand or do not have the experience of having engage school districts.
I will start with the parents. We have a parent group called Parent Engagement Partners. Then we have a student group called Youth Engagement Partners. The Parent Engagement Partners for the past year and a half to two years have had a conversation in different schools in Portland with broader parents on how to create a meaningful engagement between them and Portland Public Schools. They’re in this conversation. They create a form of conversation called shared space café, where we joke that everyone is an expert. Most of the parents are coming from immigrant background, but it’s not exclusive group for immigrant parents.
We have some mainstream parents who may or may not have graduated high school or may not have experience or may not have engagement or communications between them and the school system. It used to be housed with City of Portland’s Refugee Services and then the foundation wanted administration or school or something like that to base it on, so they asked Muskie School to apply for the grant and Muskie school did within the organization, but Muskie School got it.
Because I was working on the project anyway, they wrote me into the grant, so I moved to Muskie School with the grant. The work did not exclusively start at Muskie School. It was started from the refugee services and then it moved to Muskie School. We did a one on one to gather information on what other issues between that demographic, what was the issues and challenges that they have and what came up with communications. We also went on further to do more conversations in different communities that are the parents who are involved are coming from. Then gather more information then decided to have what they call the Shared Space Café. We have a parent, what we call lead parent organizers.
The basic idea is to come up with certain way of communication that will make schools comfortable in engaging parents who are from that background and also make it very comfortable for these parents to walk into school districts or their children’s classrooms in high school and talk to the teachers without any reservation. The whole idea is to make high school experience meaningful for students.
Lisa: What are some of the issues that you hear from students or from parents who are from other countries or have a different religious background and they’re trying to interact with a school or community? What types of things come up that you hear about?
Pious: Well, I’m going to take off my hat as a staff member for Portland Empowered. I wear so many hats. I’m also not speaking as a school board member. I’m speaking as me, somebody who does a lot of work in the community. I think some of the issues that comes up in my engagement with families and students in the community is some of the claims that students or the families that made either language barrier on both sides. Misunderstanding or miscommunication. Where the young people, the Portland public school is very diverse in terms of racial and language and religions.
We have kids who are coming from many different backgrounds. The staff at Portland schools do their best to understand where and who is coming from where. Unfortunately, it’s … How do you say it? It’s a tall list of things that you have to learn. There’s bound to be somebody being called names or somebody being referred to as this or that by other students who may not necessarily even know what they are saying. There are situations like that. Most specifically you hear stories here and there.
I’m a Muslim, so I talk to people a lot in the Muslim community and the immigrant Muslim communities. The recent national platform political rhetoric did, yes, increase or created a few instances here in Portland where there’s a parent, one from Iraq who was at a bus stop. She didn’t specifically say which bus stop where somebody was talking to another person, look at her and spit in her face. This woman doesn’t speak any English, so she doesn’t even know what to say. There was an instant where someone was sitting by the waiting room in one of the big hospitals in Portland and another patient start yelling at her and telling her to go back where she came from, because here people don’t like Americans. What is she doing here?
In both situations, these people don’t necessarily speak good English, so they didn’t know how to react. It’s unfortunate that both situations happened to women based on the way they look because I can walk down the street. Yes, I’m a black man. Someone will see it as a black man and probably say, “Oh, he’s not an immigrant,” but a person cannot know what I worship or what religion or what’s my faith based on the color of my skin or how I look. Also, I don’t dress specifically like any, I don’t wear any religious, edifice that shows that this person is a Muslim or a Christian or whatever it is. It’s difficult for mostly women and children.
Lisa: I just think about as a woman if I was in another country standing at a bus stop and somebody spit in my face and said something to me and I didn’t even understand them, I can’t imagine how that would make me feel.
Pious: Right. Even in that instance where a young woman was at a gas station here in Portland, and that’s about 8 year ago. That person who was buying gas, he happens the be a veteran. He’s not from Portland. He’s actually not from Maine. He’s from Connecticut or somewhere. He’s been to Iraq and he kept calling all sort of name. He said he was going to kill her. The gas station attendants have to literally hold on the door and tell him he was not welcome there. The good thing was that he was already finished paying for his gas, so there’s no need for him to get into the building. They took his license plate number and hand it over to the police.
It came out that the car doesn’t even belong to him. It’s for his dad. He lives in Connecticut. He was a veteran. I don’t know how that case ended, but the police were working on it at the time that I knew of it. It’s difficult.
Lisa: It’s so complicated, because you have on one side people who may be refugees who have their own set of painful circumstances and then you have people who are veterans or have their side of their background and their experience. There’s enough pain to go around, but we all have to co-exist. We all have to live here together, so how do we make that happen?
Pious: Well, try to understand each other. I’m a firm believer that speaking to people irrespective of who they are or what your beliefs are, try at least to reach out to that person, talk to that person, understand where that person is coming from. Having that conversation opens a lot of doors and a lot of opportunities for us as humans to leave peacefully next to each other irrespective of what we believe or what we lean on. I believe that we all are looking for the same thing, which is everybody wants to live peacefully. Everybody wants to raise families. They want to have a safe home, have food on their table and go about their lives without being disturbed or interrupted by someone else.
Having a conversation with an open mind, just know that, yes, you have the right to live, but other people also have the right to live without you imposing your beliefs or the way of your life on them. To each way of life. As far as my way of life is not getting in your way. I believe that you don’t have to force me to live the way you live. Then we all live in peace. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that in reality.
Lisa: Why did you decide to come to Maine?
Pious: It’s a long story. I didn’t come to Maine to live in Maine. I’m joking. I have a friend who came to school here. He came to Maine College of Art. I visited him a couple of times. I was going to move to Albany, New York. I have friends who said, “You can come work here.” Then I came here to stay for a week or something like that and I met my ex-wife and decided not to go anywhere.
Lisa: How has it worked out for you?
Pious: Well, Maine is a great place. Well, I can talk for Portland because I live in Portland. I lived a little bit in Cape Elizabeth but not enough for me to talk for on behalf, even though it’s a great place, but I cannot speak for Cape Elizabeth. I can speak for Portland. I think Portland is a great place, great people … I have experimented with different ideas and I got nothing but support. I have grown into a different person than I was from when I arrived in this country. I have at least transitioned from being somebody who worked in the media who was a photojournalist or a photographer into somebody who does social work, work with young people and work in the community.
I’ve had tons of support in everything that I have done. I can say nothing but that I think it’s working good and I’m grateful for all the support and all the people that I’ve engaged in that journey. Actually, I think Sunday was is 14 years since I moved to Maine. There’s been some challenges, ups and downs, but it’s been nothing but exciting and I’m looking forward to do more.
Lisa: Pious, how can people find out about Portland Empowered or more about the King Fellows program?
Pious: Both of them, King Fellows have a Facebook page and actually can follow. It’s having a youth summit next week on January 16. It’s part of the Martin Luther King Day celebrations. King Fellow is having a youth summit from 1 to 5. We’re going to have the mayor and the superintendent of schools, some school board members and hopefully some city counselors. They’re going to talk about young black students and the challenges that they face in the schools and in the community with the mayor. Both have Facebook page.
King Fellows have a Facebook page that is public Facebook. Portland Empowered have a Facebook page which is for the whole program called Portland Empowered, but you only see the youth part. Then you’ll see the parent part. We post stuff and we have a couple of blips about on both Facebooks have a short blips on what the groups are about.
Lisa: Well, I appreciate the work that you’ve done here in Portland and for the state of Maine. I thank you for coming in to speak with me today. We’ve been talking with Pious Ali, who is a youth and community engagement specialist working on a project called Portland Empowerered with the Muskie School public service, and who is also the co-director and co-founder of the King Fellows program and also a member of the Portland’s board of education and the first African born American and Muslim to be elected to a public office in Maine. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your talents and your energy. I appreciate it.
Pious: Thank you for having me.