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Photo by Jason Wilson
Avis Atkins is a senior at CSULB. By summer, she will have graduated in four years, majoring in Human Development with two minors in sociology and psychology. As an honor student, she is the founder/president of Black Scholars, the vice-president of the Rotaract Leadership Club, and a senator of the College of Liberal Arts Associated Students Incorporated. She is hoping to become a college counselor and eventually a college president.
This would be a lot of weight for anyone to carry, but when you understand where she came from, these accomplishments and goals become astounding.
Avis and her four siblings grew up with her father, a Vietnam war veteran who battled an addiction to crack. During her elementary years she regularly begged for money on the street, lived in five cities, attended eleven different schools, lived in a West Hollywood apartment, two motels, two homeless shelters, and a van.
With a smile, she recalls one cold winter night when Reginald VelJohnson (Carl Winslow on Family Matters) gave her $20 and a bucket of chicken.
At the age of seven, she met her mother for the first time (who was by then, a clean crack addict). Her stepfather was physically abusive, an active crack addict, and a thief who would steal money from her and her siblings and get in fistfights with her father. After a lengthy custody court battle, she and her siblings lived with her father in an Atlantic Avenue G.I. house.
Blaming his father for not spending enough time with him, her older brother committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. In his latter days, her father suffered from a deep depression, dabbled in crack, and developed an aggressive cancer that rapidly spread throughout his body. Avis tenderly remembers seeing the bumps under his arms and on his torso.
And then he died alone on his bed at home.
Throughout her entire senior year of high school, Avis lived at home completely alone.
During the last days of her father’s life, she asked him why he treated her so differently than the rest of the kids. She had a deep love and respect for him, but wondered why she always had to do most of the begging and assume so much more responsibility than the others.
With quivering lips and tears streaming down her cheeks, she told me the answer that would change her life forever:
“Because I always knew you could handle it. I see something in you. You got something real special.”
“A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.” (a Chinese Proverb provided by Avis)
// JASON WILSON
We want to LOVE this city! Photo by Jeff Gould
So deliberate is the manner of Scott Jones and so demonstrative are his actions that at one point during our conversation—most of which concerns We Love Long Beach (welovelb.com), a secular/nonprofit community advocacy group the 26-year-old Long Beach native formed with his sister, Robin, 30—I jot down “love lobbying” in the corner of my notebook. Which is to say Scott Jones takes love—and all its meanings, forms and implications—very seriously. And he’d like you to, too.
In the time since 50 people showed up to the first neighborhood breakfast on March 31, 2008, We Love Long Beach has become something of a grassroots get-to-know-one-another phenomenon: 500 people attended a bands-and-BBQ bash last summer, featuring such local greats as Deep Sea Diver and the Fling; monthly dinners (at restaurants like Caffe La Strada, On the Mark, Number Nine Noodles and, on Jan. 29, Smooth’s Sports Grille) are regularly attended by upwards of 40 residents; another community breakfast will be held the morning of Feb. 28 at Livingston Park; and there is a BBQ scheduled for May 23 at Marine Stadium Park.
And that’s to say nothing of the offshoot club Scott formed for students at the Jones’s alma mater, Wilson High, where members earn service hours by hosting luncheons for special needs students and, in April, their teachers.
“I’d like to know more people in the city than anyone else,” he says. “It’s one thing to say we’re a diverse city, but it’s another to say we are a city that gets along.”
To that end, the essence of We Love Long Beach lies in its vision statement: “To know and serve the people, neighborhoods and the city of Long Beach.” And the first step toward achieving it, Scott explains, is saying hello to our neighbors—“knowing what they do, where they work.” Which leads to trust: “Every relationship is based on trust—husbands and wives, friends,” he continues. From there, Scott jumps to community, or “working off different gifts and passions,” with the ultimate goal being addressing needs, the kind that are far greater than borrowing a box of sugar. “You go off deeper needs and you become friends,” he concludes.
One could look at Scott and Robin’s efforts and see only idiosyncratic wishes rooted in youthful idealism—or, conversely, note in their accomplishments (delivering four dozen new diners to a restaurant, for example) the potential dangers that come with such influence—namely, power.
But to this Scott offers a sentence, written by Arts of the Wise Leader author Mark Strom: “True humanity is to take people places they haven’t been, so that they might go places I can’t go.”
“The goal for this year is to fine tune and get good at what we can do,” Scott says. “We’d like to be able to do what we do well in every neighborhood.”
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