Note: Soul Sessions is produced as a podcast first and designed to be listened to. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes the emotion and inflection meant to be conveyed by human voice. Our transcripts are created using human transcribers, but may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting.

PAUL:
A little behind the scenes here for you: we record this podcast remotely. You can be literally almost anywhere and log on. But I didn't have to look too far to find this episode's guest. Hey, it's Paul Wolf with a front-row seat to Conversations on Culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call the podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places and events that make the City With Soul Shine. On today's show, Sophie McNeil Wolf, the Director of Communications and Insights for the Community Foundation for Mississippi, is my guest. She also happens to be my wife. We talk about her work at our house often, but it's so important. I thought you might like a glimpse into the great things she and her colleagues do for Jackson.

Are we going to get through this without laughing the whole time?

SOPHIE:
No, and this probably should be in the podcast about how we're doing this, from just what? 50 feet away.

PAUL:
50 feet away. Yeah.

SOPHIE:
It's kind of like, well, well, it took this long for me to get on the podcast.

PAUL:
Yes. It shouldn't have taken this long though, because you've always had your feet firmly planted in Jackson and what's going on here and being a part of the community. I guess first you should give a little background about, the things you've done. Maybe just kind of the Cliffs Notes version of your community involvement in Jackson.

SOPHIE:
Yeah, I went to the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg and came back after college and actually started working at Visit Jackson. That was my first job out of college. It's where I met you and really started to dive deep into community work. And that's really been a thread throughout all of my life is really, Jackson and how to make this a better place. And that led me to Millsaps College, then led me to work for the public university system. And I really missed, during COVID, the connection that I had with community. I really missed that work and wanted to kind of dive back into that. And that led me to the Community Foundation where I've been for two and a half years.

PAUL:
Yeah. Your work and my work at Visit Jackson kind of intersect so much that, you know, we have those kind of, you know, water cooler conversations over the dinner table at night, since we are married and we have so many connections in common. I think that it would be important to explain and to tell more about what it is a community foundation does, because I don't, I don't know that a lot of people understand the role that you play.

SOPHIE:
A lot of people don't understand what a community foundation is. And we're trying to change that. They are all over the country and there are seven here in Mississippi. We cover central and southwest Mississippi and community foundations are a hub for people to pool money together that they might not be able to do on their own. Think of it kind of like crowdfunding before there was crowdfunding a hundred years ago. And folks really like community foundations because it allows them to be flexible and to do projects in the community or leave a legacy for when they're no longer here and they want to make sure that the things they supported while they were alive, while they're no longer here. There's a lot of ways you can get connected with the Community Foundation.

As a matter of fact, I just think about the Soul Sessions season you've had thus far and who you've had all and so many of them are connected to the Community Foundation in some way. WellsFest Cares, the Book Festival, Jackson Friends of the Library, plenty are kind of supported or even are housed—their financial home is—at the Community Foundation. And I think a lot of people don't recognize that, but they recognize these names that were affiliated within the community and friends giving actually this event that we have coming up in November is a great way to get connected and to start understanding what a community foundation is because friends giving together is exactly what a community foundation does.

PAUL:
Yeah. We're going to talk more about that great event coming up at the Two Mississippi Museums in November, but I have to backtrack a little bit. You're talking about the imprint the community foundation has on the community. Most recently we've seen the Keith Harring fitness court finally come to fruition and it's a Belhaven Heights Park. Tell me about the role that the community foundation played in helping to make that a reality.

SOPHIE:
It was around this time last year that our staff was kind of talking about this project. It kind of came to our mind that with certain things after COVID that it looked like it wasn't moving forward. And we wanted to see what we could do. And we did some investigating and called up the National Fitness Court folks and realized that at the time we had until December 31st —so December 31st, 2023,—to basically raise the money or we would have to get it back. And so we decided that we wanted to kind of be the ones to connect everyone and figure out how we could push it over the finish line.

At the time, it was also going to be located somewhere else that, really, after getting some engineers out there, it wasn't feasible. And we worked with the Greater Belhaven Foundation and some other folks like Jackson Hart, who had also been involved from the beginning, Visit Jackson, of course, to move the location to where it was installed, which is Belhaven Heights Park. We helped manage along with the Greater Belhaven Foundation, the concrete pour in the installation and just had a grand opening ribbon cutting of sorts to kind of welcome the community in. And we hope that everybody gets a lot of use out of it. And also it's a great asset for the Museum Trail, which is just within feet of where it's installed.

PAUL:
And also a project that the Community Foundation was a part of. It just keeps going and going, doesn't it?

SOPHIE:
Yeah. You see lots of that. The Museum Trail is another great example of that. They were about $125,000 short of actually funding that first portion of the museum trail. Similar situation. If they didn't get the money within a certain amount of time, there were transportation dollars that would have to go back and we filled that gap and kind of brought that project to fruition. So you see that happen a lot with the Community Foundation.

PAUL:
And these projects don't happen without people giving and without people estate planning and endowments and setting up funds. they understand the value of projects in the community. We mentioned Friendsgiving earlier. So I want you to talk a little more about that. What a great event that was last year was held at the Cedars in Fondren and Chef Damien Cavicchi from Hal & Mal's prepared such an amazing meal. This year it moves to a larger spot, the Two Mississippi Museums and the food will be just as good because it's chef Damien Cavicchi preparing it again.

SOPHIE:
It was such a great event. It was a brainchild of mine and some of my coworkers, Melody and Sandy. We were thinking about, hey, how could we engage younger folks? How could we also visually show what it is to be a Community Foundation through this idea of Friendsgiving together? But really it kind of hearkens back to me thinking about where I am in my life. And Paul, you and I, we've had this conversation before about as you get older, Friendsgiving was a really fun thing when we were in our 20s and 30s. It was a way to get connected with our friends. It was always a really fun time. But as we get older and friends start to have kids or maybe even move away, it's harder to get friends together for Friendsgiving.

And that was really the idea that sparked my coworkers, Melody, Sandy and I to think about Friendsgiving. How could we make it easy for people to be able to join with their friends still, but do it in a way where the pressure is off? We handle everything. An amazing menu: Damien is an incredible storyteller through food and when I connected with him last year and started to brainstorm with him, immediately he got it. He understood what we were trying to do and we love working with him every year. As a matter of fact, people who couldn't come, we put out the menu ahead of time. There were people calling the restaurant trying to get the menu as a Thanksgiving meal, which was pretty incredible. And as a matter of fact, some of the dishes like the tamale dressing that he did for Friendsgiving, he ended up putting on the Hal & Mal's Thanksgiving to-go menu because it was so popular.

So yeah, we're really excited to have a new menu. I'm sure there'll be some favorites that are back. We were just mulling over that menu the other day. So I'm really excited to have a bigger space to bring everybody together. The great thing that we also provide is childcare. So if you have a child between the ages of one and 11, they can actually come for free. We have childcare with the Family Social Club. And that's actually pretty unusual for Jackson events. Childcare is typically not included, but at the community foundation, we are really intentional about what we call radical hospitality. We want everybody to feel welcome and included and to be considered. And that is just another way to kind of build a bigger table is to make sure that there's less barriers for folks to attend. We want everybody to feel like they don't have to do a lot of logistics work to get there.

PAUL:
Yeah, we were just talking with friends last night and mentioning the fact that Mississippi is often the poorest state in the nation but is also the most generous. mean, studies have shown this much. And there's something about what the community foundation can do with your dollars when you pull them together to do big things in the state of Mississippi and Jackson specifically.

SOPHIE:
The great thing about community foundations is it's a place for people to come with their ideas, to work together and to really bring more people to the table.

PAUL:
That's Sophie McNeil-Wolf from the Community Foundation for Mississippi. If you're wondering about how you can use your resources to make big projects happen in the city, or maybe you want to snag tickets for Friendsgiving on November 19th, you'll find links in our show notes at visitjackson.com/soulsessions.

Our podcast is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Mississippi's capital city. Our Executive Producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Ricky Thigpen, and I'm our Managing Editor. You want to know more about the great work we're doing to help make Jackson a better place? You can find it at visitjackson.com.

I'm Paul Wolf, and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

Listen to previous episodes of Soul Sessions