Art by Joyce Lomax The Black Heritage Museum and Cultural Center bhmacc.org
Joyce Lomax is an Atlanta based artist
Art by Joyce Lomax The Black Heritage Museum and Cultural Center bhmacc.org
The Black Heritage
Museum & Cultural Center, Inc.
Our mission is to document and preserve Black heritage, culture, and scholarship and use it to encourage, empower, and uplift current and future generations through scholarly engagement, art, and artistic expression, while cultivating critical thought.
What We've Been Up To
We are grateful to have had the opportunity to serve a number of families as part the November & December holiday seasons this year during the COVID-19 pandemic which adversely affected so many families economically.
In November, the BHMACC was able to provide groceries to very vulnerable families. When the December holiday season was approaching, Ayanna Mustafa-Reid, our Executive Director began our outreach in preparation to provide vulnerable families with groceries in December. In her outreach she found that a few of the families we had previously served had slipped even further into vulnerability during this difficult economic time brought on by the pandemic. One family had lost their residence and had entered a shelter, another family was in the process of looking into finding a shelter that would take them in as a family. Yet another family of sisters who lived in different states were trying to figure out how to pool their meager resources to survive through the month, (one sister had already lost her residence).
BHMACC leadership met to determine how we could best serve these very vulnerable families after hearing from them directly as to what would best help them during this time of uncertainty. We determined that we would also give gift cards so that the families we served could use the resources however best served their own families, whether they used it to pay their utilities or any other bill, use the funds toward their rent, food, holiday gifts for their children, or to barter with it however they saw fit to be the highest and best use for their families.
It turned out that those families expressed deep gratitude and appreciated that we respected them to do what was best for their families.
We continued to be humbled. We will continue to be of service when and where we can.