Talking People Back into Their Power

Stewards across the country are imagining, inspiring, and building a movement to thrive together. Through their actions and their words, they are making the case for an equitable and thriving future in their communities and bringing others into the work. Here, Brian Archie, a leader in the fight for health justice, shares how he was encouraged to find that he had the power to create the future he wanted for his community—an approach he now uses to urge others to act.

It’s a question that was once posed to Brian Archie, which he now asks of others.

As executive director of Create a Healthier Niagara Falls Collaborative, Brian helps people understand why they must act to get to the future they want, and to believe in their own power and ownership over solutions to make change.

“People are looking for social change,” Brian said. “People are looking to uphold the unspoken social contract of being my brother’s keeper,” he added, emphasizing the importance of helping each other.

Brian takes the social contract a step further by encouraging people to see connections as essential to a healthier future for Niagara Falls.

“I say to folks, ‘I'm only as healthy and well as my neighbor is,’” Brian said. “And if I don't know who my neighbor is, I can't boast of having a healthy community or of being a true steward because I don't know who's there and what the actual need is.”

Brian’s desire to bring neighbors closer together has resulted in the Create a Healthier Niagara Falls Collaborative’s Resident Engagement Council. He and his team work with residents from the community to take on leadership roles and advocate for community improvement.

“You find residents who have an idea, and you sit down and formulate a plan, and you try to implement it. It could be an idea for a block, a side of town, or the entire city. It’s how we engage more residents and create solid paths for change with the city. We want to be the go-to group so people will see the positive of Niagara Falls,” Brian said.

Brian admits he needed to be talked into his own power in order to broaden his own connections and impact on the health of Niagara Falls by entering an arena he never imagined: politics. When first approached to run for city council, he rejected the idea.

“It almost seems that you lose your identity once you're a part of that club, and I just didn't want any part of it,” Brian said. “In my mind, I said ‘you want to muffle me, you want to silence me.’ I had no allegiances to anything but my people.”

But then his people—the trusted mentors he knew as neighbors who had experienced disenfranchisement and their own evolution and understood what that journey meant to others—asked an even more powerful question: “How dare you? How dare you not show people within your community, who have been through similar things, that there is hope?”

He knew they were right. Brian ran for city council and won.

Far from being muffled, his experience has bolstered his confidence in collective problem-solving for his community, while staying true to himself.

When a neighbor’s car was spray painted with hateful graffiti and vandalized, he spoke to local television media about how the incident would impact his neighborhood’s children. “They don’t need to have to endure that even before they’ve gotten an opportunity to enter school,” he told the reporter.

Brian’s desire to protect the children of his community goes hand in hand with his desire to inspire residents to believe in themselves and the community, regardless of the obstacles.

“Where there are challenges, there are also opportunities,” he said. “Being as relational as possible allows me to keep the core of who I am intact. And I can show others that if they follow their own path, there’s something there for them, whatever it may be.”

He continues to ask people to imagine what they could do for their community, knowing that being asked the right questions encouraged him to embrace his own power and voice for change.

“If you’re not a part of the movement, things are happening to you without your say-so.” Listen to more from Brian Archie on Rippel’s Unsung Stewards podcast, where he is featured with his colleague, Evelyn Harris, the woman Brian credits for talking him into his power.

About Brian Archie
Brian Archie helps lead the fight for health justice as the executive director of Create a Healthier Niagara Falls Collaborative, a not-for-profit organization that focuses on food access, physical activity, and social connections to help empower residents to action. Civic responsibility carried Brian into local politics. He currently serves in an official capacity as Niagara Falls city councilman. He is a board member with Niagara Falls Housing Authority, Heart Love and Soul, Shared Mobility Inc., and the New York Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. He was appointed in July 2022 to the NYS Racial Equity Working Group to help craft and implement policies with the Office of Health and Minority Health Disparities Prevention. Brian previously served as chair of the Niagara Falls Human Rights Commission and a member of the Niagara Falls Chapter of NAACP. In this work, he leads with the belief that we are only as healthy as our neighbors, and that by “reaching one, we teach many.”