2019 Mojo Awards

We also recognize Ballet Memphis for spreading the word about the kind of artistic excellence Memphis has to offer. A 2015 performance by the company at New York’s Joyce Theatre, for example, “shattered the basic rules” of ballet, according to New York Times’ dance critic Alastair Macaulay, who wrote that Ballet Mem-phis showed that “no one composer is enough for what they have to say, and for the hybrid Memphian culture they’re representing.” At the Kennedy Center the company danced to the music of Roy Orbison, and the Washington’s Post’s Sara Kaufman wrote “The ache and darkness Ballet Memphis put onstage was more than a dance, it was an echo of human experience.”

The company strives for diversity; on stage and behind the scenes, among donors and board members, knowing that the arts are important to the quality of life for everyone in a city. “I’m just so grateful that this is what we’ve been able to do by coming together as human beings who aren’t from the same backgrounds or all the same race,” Pugh says. “One of our donors said I walk in this building, I feel like I’m at the little UN.”

The building itself is designed to be inviting and to show that art is not exclusive. “We want people to just come in and pick up a sandwich and say, oh, I think I’ll wander down the hall and see what’s going on in the rehearsal room.” Pugh says. “And I want people in the building to always know there’s a world out there, that we need to do our part in sustaining and growing and preserving and serving. We need a lot of effort to explain to other people that we care about who they are.”

FIRST CONGO

Cheryl Cornish

Sonia Walker

Julia Hicks

We’re happy to deliver a Mojo of Midtown Award to First Congregational Church and to the three women, Cheryl Cornish, Sonia Walker and Julia Hicks, who direct the church’s unique mission of providing spiritual guidance while speaking to social justice.

“We have found Midtown to be a real crossroads of needs and resources,” says Cheryl Cornish, the church’s Senior Minister. “So part of our calling as a church is to be there for people in need.”

“The reason Midtown is perfect for us and we’re perfect for Midtown is the eclectic nature of Midtown,” says Director of Mission Julia Hicks. “It’s where you’re going to find black, white, Hispanic, poor, wealthy, middle class, educated, uneducated, religious, non-religious.”

First Congo (as it is popularly known), is a part of the United Church of Christ organization, which was founded a century and a half ago as an anti-slavery church. It has has been in Cooper Young since 2001 and today serves a membership of around three hundred fifty. Associate Pastor Sonia Walker describes it as “Very theologically liberal, with a strong social justice bent,” voicing deep concern about some of the major issues confronting Memphis and America; Race, Class and Economics.

In a city where hunger is all too common, First Congo is an island. The Church’s Café Congo alone serves 400 free meals each week. Additionally, the church and thirty partner organizations provide space for everything from a hostel to work-shops for everything from bicycles to bees, as well as music, art and a theatre group, turning the 83,000 square foot church into a “stewardship of space.”

“If folks come at us with an idea for something that they feel called to do, we really try to listen to that,” says Cheryl Cornish. “Some ideas work and some don’t, but we really try to be responsive to people as they’re feeling called to live out their faith to do something positive in the world.”

Sonia Walker says First Congo strives to keep three principles in focus; stand for peace and justice, keep things simple and always welcome the stranger.

“We know this for sure, we serve the people that God sends to our door.”

OVERTON PARK CONSERVANCY

Tina Sullivan

To walk one of Overton Park’s many trails is to look back in time, to see the kind of forests that covered the Memphis area thousands of years ago. Today Overton Park today is an urban refuge for animals, a stopover for migrating birds. And it’s the heart of Midtown. The Midtown Memphis Development Corporation is pleased to award a Mojo Award to the Overton Park Conservancy and Executive Director Tina Sullivan for their efforts to protect and improve Overton Park, our vital and unique resource.

Overton Park is one of a very few old growth forests still standing inside an American city and it’s the only one in the South-east. While it appears pristine today, it is hard to recall the difference a decade makes. As late as 2011 the Park was run down and badly littered, some restrooms had been closed. Drug use and criminal activity were common. One problem was money. That started to change in 2012 when city government approved putting the one hundred and eighty acres of parkland in the hands of the Conservancy and gave the Conservancy a mandate to make a difference.

“Once we started cleaning things up and building things that people wanted to use, people came back very quickly,” Tina Sullivan says.

Today, because of the Conservancy’s efforts, just seventeen percent of the Park’s budget comes from the city of Memphis. The rest comes from donations big and small; from individuals, corporate sponsors and foundations. That money goes to maintenance, repairs and landscaping of the Greensward, Rainbow Lake, the Gardens, Veterans Plaza and the Old Forest Natural Area. And to the never ending fight to keep out invasive species.

While the Levitt Shell is separate from the Park itself, Tina is quick to point out that the Shell, with its free concert series, is a big part of the renaissance of Overton Park, attracting people from all over the area. And the Conservancy is working on a master plan to keep improving the park. Meanwhile, Tina says that a walk in the park is one of the perks of her job, a joy in any season.

“It is a snapshot of everything I love about Memphis. When the park is full on a busy day, you see a population that reflects the population of Memphis and everybody’s having a good time together. And that makes me very happy.”

Dr. MIKE KIRBY

The Midtown Memphis Development Corporation honors Dr. Mike Kirby with a Mojo Award for reminding us of the power of volunteers and the value of bridges. VECA volunteers and Dr. Kirby led the way in re-purposing an abandoned railroad bed that by the mid-90s had become a trash dump and a magnet for drug use. Today the V&E Green-line cuts a verdant path across Midtown from near Crosstown to Hyde Park. “I didn’t have a clue what it was going to be,” says Dr. Kirby, a now-retired Rhodes College professor of Urban Studies. “I just said we got to do something.”

VECA bought the property “for ten thousand dollars and all kinds of legal fees” and a small group of volunteers started cleaning up and mowing grass. Then word got around the neighborhood about what they were doing. “We didn’t have any money. So one day we said ‘what would happen if we printed some brochures and just distributed them to the surrounding houses.’ We did it and all of a sudden checks started coming in.”

Gaps in the V&E Greenline, where the railroad had removed two small bridges, were a problem. “The neighborhood was kind of chopped up because the bridges were no longer there,” Dr. Kirby says. A Memphis company, Keeler Iron Works, heard about the situation and told VECA that Keeler would build the bridges if VECA would buy the materials. It unified the neighborhood.

“Once the first bridge got put in, some of the people on the west side said, well, you always thought of us as the bad neighbors, but we’re really good neighbors and we want to be part of you.” One VECA resident, Mary Wilder, called the bridge project a “miracle of volunteerism.” “That’s how it came about,” says Dr. Kirby. “If you had to guess that a small volunteer group like us could come up with a way to build a bridge. You got to be kidding.”

A core group of VECA volunteers still manages everything from finances to maintenance, with sometimes hundreds of volunteers (including students from nearby Rhodes) joining in to work on projects. Today the V&E Greenline is a path for bicycling and walking and a space for gardening, visiting and the annual Art Walk. It is used by almost two hundred Memphians daily.

OTHERLANDS

Karen Lebovitz

A gift to celebrate a twenty-five year anniversary is usually of silver. Instead, we’re giving Karen Lebovitz a Mojo of Midtown Award for twenty-five years owning and operating Otherlands. It’s been a coffee house and café, gift shop and music venue. But more than anything, Otherlands has been one of the best places in Midtown to experience the free flow of conversation and ideas.

A few things to know about Karen: She grew up in Memphis, graduated from U.T. Knoxville, and lived in Colorado for a bit. Before Otherlands, Karen mowed lawns and worked at Squash Blossom. Then she opened her own futon store, with an eye on the other half of the South Cooper space where Otherlands has always been. By 1994 she had a dream, driven by a certain television comedy set in a bar. The one where “everybody knows your name.”

“I would fall asleep watching Cheers every night. And so I kind of imagined it that way,” she says. “When I first started, people just came here to meet other people. It was way before people had cell phones or laptops. So people were focused on each other.” A lot of relationships have started over a Café Latte, she says. It’s where she and her husband Steve met. “I would say probably a hundred people met here; romance, marriage, a really good friend.”

But the business part wasn’t always easy. During the 2008 recession her barista had to sweep the floors. A lot of employees have come and gone, some bad, some good. And one, a guy named Ovid from Romania, was simply eccentric.

“He was so straight about how it went that you could not order a double espresso to go. You had to drink it right there.” On occasion the staff lines up the chairs and turns the place into a music venue. Otherlands has hosted performers from Sid Selvidge and Jim Dickinson to Julien Baker.

The style of the place reflects a “bit of fantasy” with art-covered walls, a fish tank, gifts from everywhere, flyers and posters. There’s the smoky-sweet smell of incense and chess games that seem to never end, solitary customers with laptops and a cup, and people intently doing business. It is a place where ideas are incubating. “I think it means a lot to a lot of people in terms of meeting other people and brainstorming and making things happen. To have created something here that helps the community and was a place where people would go. It’s a pretty good legacy.”

ONIE JOHNS

When Onie Johns signed the papers on the building that came to be known as Caritas Village, there was $48 left in the bank. That was 2005. It’s “always a struggle” she says, about the organization she founded. And while Johns stepped down in 2017, Caritas Village is still there, helping to improve lives in Binghampton. The Midtown Memphis Development Corporation is proud to honor Caritas Village and Onie Johns with a Mojo of Midtown Award for a “ministry of presence” in one of Memphis most underserved neighborhoods.

It was 2000 and Onie Johns was working in health care when she decided to get out of her comfort zone She moved out of Germantown (where she knew “about three” of her neighbors”) and into Binghampton. The word ‘caritas’ is itself the Latin term for charity, as in love for humankind, and she quickly found a need for it. “When I first drove through I thought it was the most deprived neighborhood I had ever seen,” she says. “But it’s so rich in culture and relationships.” Taking part in a Christian Leadership Class led to the idea for Caritas Village. “It was probably the first time I had seriously looked at power and privilege.” The idea was to break down barriers in Memphis, between black and white, rich and poor.

Her first act of charity was to distribute free bread that had been donated. Some residents accepted it, some did not. But Johns learned from the experience and almost twenty years later ““My job is to keep passing out bread.” Caritas Village now offers a pay-as-you-can restaurant, a free health clinic, after school and ESL programs, tutoring, Bible study, and cultural and arts activities including theater, music concerts and art. The four by eight block area that is Binghampton is “Perhaps the most diverse neighborhood in Memphis,” Ms. Johns says. Today residents speak “something less than twenty different languages,” sometimes leading to cultural confusion. Once, in the community kitchen, she says, there were “A Sudanese woman, two guys from Nepal, an African American, and a Latino. It’s a wonder anything ever came out of the kitchen the way it was supposed to be.” She calls living in Binghampton a “rich experience” and says while “we didn’t come here to change the world” Caritas Village has turned out the way she wanted. It’s a place, she says, where “small miracles happen daily.”