Oprah Winfrey is donating $2 million to the city of Nashville, as part of her Coronavirus Relief Fund, through the Oprah Winfrey Charitable Foundation. The talk show host has pledged a total of $12 million to various cities where she once lived, including Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Kosciusko, the small Mississippi town where she was born.
“The reason I’m talking about it is because there is going to be a need for people of means to step up,” Oprah told The Associated Press (via WKRN). “I mean, this thing is not going away. Even when the virus is gone, the devastation left by people not being able to work for months who were holding on paycheck to paycheck, who have used up their savings — people are going to be in need.
“So my thing is, look in your own neighborhood, in your own backyard to see how you can serve and where your service is most essential,” she added. “That is the real essential work, I think, for people of means.”
Oprah’s sizable donation will go to NashvilleNurtures, which in partnership with Mount Zion Baptist Church and Tennessee State University, plans to feed 10,000 families in and around Music City.
“I’m not opposed to big organizations dispersing money, but I always like to do the on-the-ground grassroots stuff myself,” Oprah said of her generous gifts. “Look, I want to be able to reach people who have been incarcerated and are coming out of prison. I want to reach mothers of domestic violence. I want to reach people. I want to feed people. I want to help people get access to testing.”
Oprah might be helping in various cities, but she is also helping those closest to her as well, whose finances have been negatively impacted because of the health crisis.
“The first thing I did was start in my own family, people I knew who were going to be touched and were not going to have jobs,” Oprah acknowledged. “Then I moved out to people who I’ve worked with and known who maybe would be out of work. I started literally here, working my way out, and then into the community. So people who I hadn’t spoken to in years ended up getting checks from me like, ‘What is this?’
“All the cousins and some aunties — try to help your own family first,” she added. “I didn’t want an announcement about, ‘I’m going out into the world trying to help other people’ and then your own family saying, ‘Hey, I can’t pay my light bill. I can’t pay my rent.”
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