BOND HILL, Ohio (WKRC) - A local woman is making it her mission to empower her community and her message is getting the attention of a big name brand. Bond Hill native, Ray Ball, is proud of her home and her community. She encourages others to embrace their roots and replant into their neighborhoods.
“Looking at the environment, looking at the kids, looking at the real estate, looking at the landscape, looking at the development, looking at all of the beautiful things about it, I can't help but want to continue to empower my community to grow,” Ball said.
Her desire to grow her community started with the “My Hood Taught Me” campaign to encourage a perspective shift.
“When we think about neighborhoods, specifically minority neighborhoods or lower-income neighborhoods, we typically look at it from kind of a dim scope,” Ball said. “We look at it like I'm from the ‘hood’ and I want to get out instead of looking at it as a place that shaped you, that grew you, a place that you should really replant your seeds in because that's where you grew.”
It’s that idea that caught the attention of Nike. Ball applied to the Nike by You and Cultivator program. The program gives creatives a new platform to tell their stories.
Ball designed her own shoe for Nike, which was then sold online. The last day to get the shoes was scheduled for Monday but Ball’s shoe, The Neighborhood Rose, sold out over the weekend.
“It is a full suede material and I used that particularly because steel rose, roses in general they have thorns. They’re very tough. They can be very prickly and sometimes they can be painful but it's still a very beautiful and essentially a soft, piece of life, I'll say that,” Ball said. “I went with the suede piece that's also rose because suede is a very tough, very durable product but it's still very smooth and it's very reminiscent of our neighborhoods.”
Ball says The Neighborhood Rose project is now more than just a shoe. She says the shoe was a beautiful platform to launch the program on but she wants to use this opportunity to further her initial mission.
“The goal is continue to go into communities, go into spaces, work with companies and community initiatives to continue to empower us to activate in our communities,” Ball said. “So that’s voter education and registration, that is political and social activism. That is again, healthy cooking, nutrition programs for our youth, that is just popping up and visiting on people who don’t get to see people very often.”
Ball hosted pop-ups for the shoe release at Corporate in Cincinnati and Sole Classics in Columbus. She has another stop on her “My Hood Taught Me” Tour scheduled for Thursday at XHIBITION in Cleveland.
“It's something I never imagined would happen, especially little, ‘ol Ray from Cincinnati, Ohio but it's one of the biggest blessings that has ever happened to me,” Ball said.
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