Staying Fit
In 2011, as the pastor of St. Peter’s United Church of Christ, I founded Molo Village CDC in a distressed neighborhood in Louisville to provide much-needed services for the community’s mostly Black and poor residents. This is a labor of love that offers hope to residents who believe they were forgotten.
Louisville’s Harlem Was Falling. This Pastor Revived It
The problem I am trying to solve
Once a diverse and desirable neighborhood, the community of Russell, covering 1.4 square miles in West Louisville, was called Louisville’s Harlem because of its thriving African American business community. Russell began to decline after World War II, exacerbated by national policies. Redlining and urban renewal divided this once-robust community, destroying development and creating segregation.
Today’s residents experience inadequate housing, limited access to food, low education and systemic racism — all social determinants of health, leading to poor health outcomes like heart disease, diabetes, cancer and early death. In 2019, of the 9,590 residents, 91 percent were Black. Sixty percent lived in poverty, compared to 17 percent in the rest of the county. Almost 30 percent were unemployed.
Courtesy of Jamesetta Ferguson
To address these needs, Molo (“welcome home” in Xhosa, a South African language) developed the Village@West Jefferson, a 30,000-square foot, mixed-use facility. When it opened its doors in July 2021, the Village became the first new economic development on West Jefferson in Russell in over 30 years.
Russell residents now have a community bank, their first sit-down restaurant, an Early Head Start program, a technology business incubator for minority-owned businesses, a Realtor and the Norton Healthcare Institute for Health Equity, among other entities. At a second site, we provide substance abuse groups, elementary school programs and a food pantry, and we work closely with 200 recently incarcerated citizens who are reentering the community.
