I thought I could make change by just working at ground level, but to change a community you have to change policies. It's much easier to push from the top down than from the bottom up.

Aja Brown

Mayor Aja Brown on Effectively Making Change

January 24, 2015

Source: Elle, 2015

If you have the ability to do something, you should do it.

I'd like to be out in the city every day listening to what people are saying, and asking about what they need. I'd like to inspire others by doing as much as I can to help people who are trying to make a better life for themselves and others.

Chirlane McCray

I think that we as people need to do more than just talk about these issues and talk about the things that we want as people of color and go out and make these changes, because we can, but it's up to us to go and do them.

I think if we really look at policy, voting for Trump is voting against our best interests as Americans, as workers, as people of color, as women.

Kerry Washington

We are ready to work with the next administration and make sure they are as successful as they can be. Because that’s what’s best for this country.

My greatest fear would be to do all this work and build something for someone else to come tear down because of some political vendetta.

Mayor Aja Brown

In order to begin to see change start to occur, we have to be willing to have conversations with people who have different opinions than us.

Gabrielle Union

The only freedom you will probably ever know, you have begun to know now, here, the freedom to think, to imagine, to reform, to change—to start by changing yourselves and those areas around you with which you do not agree.

I just don’t want people to think that because I’m big I’m not into the same things I was into that made me big.

I think black people, across class, have many moments in our lives when we feel utterly powerless to change the direction of situations.

It's unfortunate that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

We're at a crucial point in the evolution of the world.

Forest Whitaker

Don’t sit around and complain if you don’t even vote.

Courtney B. Vance

We have to look at our own self in the mirror and self-examine our issues. Sometimes we want people to change, but we have to do our part too. We often blame the other person but sometimes it is you. You have to make sure you are doing the changes you seek from the other person, as well.

So we’ve come an extremely long way over the last half century of my public life, but there’s a way to go yet. We shouldn’t think it’s over. We know it’s not over. We see the problems.

The truth of the matter is this virus of systematic racism has gathered momentum and has morphed into a virus that has become more difficult to kill with the antibiotics that we have. And what that means is that you have prosecutors who are in cahoots with the police in terms of being impenetrable, they produce 5000 pages of documents that we cannot decipher.

If you just talk and nothing gets done, it’s empty. It’s dead.

We just really need to take a step back and look at humanity, because we need to change.

O'Shea Jackson, Jr.