Posted 7 months ago in Trending
2 MIN READ -- As Director of Development at The Community Builders, Kemena Brooks, Chicago Loop Alliance Board secretary, received recognition as one of Crain’s 2023 Class of 40 Under 40 honorees.
Read Kemena’s conversation with Crain’s reporter Dennis Rodkin below:
“When she was 16, Kemena Brooks went with her parents and brother on a family vacation to Los Angeles. One day, they did the touristy thing, walking along Hollywood Boulevard, looking at the stars in the sidewalks emblazoned with the names of great performers. But on another day, they went to Watts, a longtime center of the Black population, marked with poverty.
‘My dad always said we haven't seen a city until we see how they treat their lowest-of-income people,’ Brooks says now, 21 years after that L.A. trip. ‘We needed to see how their neighborhood impacted them and understand how my neighborhood impacted me.’
The Brooks family lived in Prince George's County, a Washington, D.C.-area locale that is among the nation's most affluent majority-Black places. ‘I had access to good schools, extracurriculars, grocery stores,’ Brooks says. ‘I wanted to know how I could play a part in changing things so more families can have access to all the things I had.’
As the director of development at The Community Builders in Chicago, Brooks has spent the past five years doing just that.
She was a leader in the development of 508 Pershing at Oakwood Shores, which brought 53 affordable rental units and retail space to Bronzeville, ‘a growing neighborhood that is dying for additional retail,’ as she puts it. In January, the Pritzker Traubert Foundation’s $10 million Chicago Prize went to another of Brooks' projects, the proposed Sankofa Wellness Village that would bring health care, fitness and arts programming to long-disinvested West Garfield Park.
‘In a neighborhood that for many years had the lowest life expectancy in the city of Chicago, we have an opportunity to make an impact on many levels,’ Brooks says. ‘That project is truly my why.’
Allison Porter-Bell, whose work for an affordable-housing lender has often put her together with Brooks, says in Brooks she sees ‘a level of gratitude for the experiences you had, and enough empathy to want to work in a realm that can help everyone be afforded better experiences.’
It comes not only from those family vacations, Porter-Bell suggests, but from Brooks' years playing basketball, including four years on a full-ride scholarship at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. ‘It's sportsmanship,’ Porter-Bell says.
Until recently, Brooks and her wife, Ashleigh Brooks, have been big fans of the city's breweries, sampling as many as they could, and of the Chicago Sky women's basketball team. But those extracurriculars are on hold at the moment, as their first child was born in August. ‘We're joyful and we're adjusting,’ she told Crain's five days into life as a parent.”
