Most of us are familiar with Detective Shakima Greggs and her work in Baltimore from the hit HBO series The Wire. Few of us are as familiar with Sonja Sohn, the actress who played Kima Greggs, and her continued work in youth development and community empowerment.

After The Wire ended in 2008, Sonja Sohn couldn’t leave Baltimore behind. Having spent years of her life in a city where the leading cause of death for African American males ages 15 to 35 was homicide, Sohn was anxious to use her experience on the show to help. She was especially inspired by the impact the cast of the show had on a voter empowerment tour of Virginia and North Carolina with the National Urban League. She used this experience to launch ReWired for Change, an organization that empowers at risk youth, families and communities living in under-served areas through educational programming, community building support and media and social advocacy.

ReWired for Change is a great example of sustained and effective organizing. While many celebrities start foundations, camps and promote volunteerism, they frequently serve as a figurehead to various causes and their impact on communities is often fleeting.  Sohn, on the other hand, has become an active thought leader – sitting on a Revitalizing Cities Think Tank panel at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative and testifying about youth violence before the Department of Justice in 2011. The NAACP, Center for Community Change and Harvard’s Black Men Forum have acknowledged her work. This past March, Sonja Sohn and various other leaders in the Baltimore community hosted a community forum called Baltimore Wake’s Up for the second time. Participants took part in a full day of education, training and engagement. Her activism nourishes the work of ReWired for Change and Sohn is proving to have a lasting impact on Baltimore communities.

by Vedan Anthony-North and Katrese Hampton

 

>via: http://progressivepupil.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/life-after-the-wire/

For five seasons, actress Sonja Sohn played Detective Shakima “Kima” Greggs on the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire, which chronicled life — and death — on Baltimore’s toughest streets.

When the series ended, Sohn stayed in East Baltimore, where she co-founded a nonprofit called ReWired for Change. The organization works with young people who have been incarcerated and who are out on parole, to try to help them straighten out their lives. Sohn uses scenes straight from The Wire to help make her point through education, media and advocacy.

The project hits close to home for Sohn, who grew up in an underserved community in Newport News, Va. As a teenager, she went through several traumatic experiences — some that she continually had to revisit on set.

“It wasn’t the scenes so much as the location,” she says. “I realized that what was happening was that I was working in neighborhoods that were very reminiscent of the neighborhoods that I grew up in. I was seeing people that reminded me of the people I grew up with. I was essentially, on some level, experiencing a retraumatization. And my brain was just short-circuiting all over the place.”

Despite having years of training both in acting and in the slam poetry world, Sohn started forgetting her lines on set. She contemplated quitting the award-winning series after the first season.

“It didn’t dawn on me that possibly some of that stuff [from my childhood] could still be affecting my life,” she says. “I started to learn a bit about trauma toward the end of my tenure on The Wire, and in the following years, I started to dive into that.”

What was most difficult for her, she realized, was playing a cop on The Wire, in part because of her own experiences with the police as a child.

“My own perception of cops was that they came into your neighborhood, they roughed up people that you loved for no reason and took them away,” she says. “As a child you saw that.”

When she was older, Sohn started calling the police herself, to protect her mother, who was being abused.

“To call the police is a really big deal because you don’t snitch — that’s the culture you grow up in,” she says. “You certainly don’t want to call the police on your father. But if I thought my mother’s life was in danger, I would pick up the phone and call the cops.”

After one serious altercation, Sohn says, she remembers the police coming to her house and essentially doing nothing about the situation.

“I saw the cop look at the other one and roll his eyes and smirk and kind of laugh, and that angered me so deeply,” she says. “I believe that sealed the inner dislike of the cops. So I had to overcome all of that to play this cop [on The Wire].”

Staying In Baltimore

After The Wire ended, many of Sohn’s co-workers returned to Los Angeles, but she stayed in Baltimore to create her nonprofit, targeted at young people who were moving in and out of the juvenile justice system. The idea came to Sohn in 2008, as she was touring the country with other cast members from The Wire to educate people about their voting rights.

“It was during that time that we discovered that we had quite a bit of influence in these underserved communities,” she says. “In North Carolina, we were doing some campaign work for now-President Obama, and we were distributing campaign literature, and we saw that there were people who hadn’t voted in past elections who were literally going to vote.”

The work made Sohn realize how influential her time on The Wire had been.

“We thought, ‘Hey, if we can pull folks off the basketball courts in Charlotte to go vote … what else could we do?’ At that point, we thought we just couldn’t use this social capital to promote our careers — it seemed so small,” she says. “So when I came up with this idea that we start this nonprofit, the fellows all liked the idea and they said, ‘We don’t have time to run it, but if you can run it, we got your back,’ and they became the founding members of the organization.”

Actors Wendell Pierce and Michael K. Williams both serve on the board of ReWired for Change. Series creator David Simon is the honorary chairman. The organization works with teenagers in Baltimore to break the cycle of crime through education, creative arts and positive messages from role models.

Sohn says running the program makes her feel like her life is finally in balance.

“I felt like I was trapped in this acting game going, ‘What is this all about? What is this all leading to?’ ” she says. “And in 2008, when I saw the kind of influence that a person who is in the public eye can have in the lives of those who have less, then I began to see, ‘Ah … this is the solution. This is what it was all leading to all this time.’ And once I embraced that, life came into perfect balance. And that’s what it’s all about.”

>via: http://www.npr.org/2012/03/15/148294942/sonja-sohn-changing-baltimore-long-after-the-wire