We were lucky to catch up with Dyrell Johnson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Dyrell, thanks for joining us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?

Success for so many people comes in such a variety of ways that it’s truly hard to define what it means. For me personally, I believe you have to not only work harder than everyone else in your field, you also have to set the pace, consistently reinvent the wheel and be the one everyone looks to for the next idea. Staying true and authentic to who you are, not trying to fit in and jump at every opportunity. You have to be very intentional about the type of success you want. It will come, just keep honing your craft and working smart.

Dyrell, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Peace and Love! My name is Dyrell Johnson, better known as Rell Black and I’m from Daytona Beach, Florida. I am the Executive Director and Founder of an amazing organization known as Community Healing Project Inc. Inspired by the incredible work and legacy of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Mary Mcleod Bethune, our organization focuses on promoting educational advancement, economic empowerment and cultural awareness in urban and underserved communities. We achieve this via a combination of youth mentoring, social activism and community engagement. Over the past 5 years we’ve hosted a countless number of positive events and initiatives including annual backpack and school supply drives, our annual toy and coat drive with Burlington Coat Factory, leading protests and engaging in community campaigns, and most importantly, our annual “Malcolm X Day Community Celebration”, in which we host each year to promote literacy, black empowerment, and cultural representation. Not only have we been active in Central Florida but our outreach campaign has touched down in other states as well. During Hurricane Harvey, our team hosted a weeklong supply drive and collected essential items such as food, water, clothing, toiletries, books/toys for children and even medicine, and packed two trucks full of items and drove fourteen hours to Third Ward Houston, Texas to aid one of our fellow organizations. Right now, our main priority is our youth based initiative “Project G.O.L.D.”, standing for goal oriented leadership development, this employment training program was designed for youth ages 14 thru 18 years old, equipping them with job and career employment readiness skills in order to get them prepared to be a productive citizen participating in today’s economy. Our outreach has gotten us significant attention and has led to me being able to share our incredible journey and story on national platforms such as ABC’s “Good Morning America”, “The Boston Globe”, as well as being a recipient of several honors including CBS NEWS “Getting Results Award”. As of today, our outreach work has serviced more than 5,000 families in over 5 states and we are truly only getting started. Outside of my work as an activist, I’m a published writer, poet and have been featured in multiple print and digital publications and have hosted several podcasts and radio shows and continue to be a speaker and a voice for the voiceless. “Changing the world, one community at a time”

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

When I first started out, the only dream I had was to make a difference in the community I grew up in. I didn’t have the best role models growing up, so I never saw myself represented fully. It wasn’t until I became a young man and started learning the history of who I was, the history of our incredible people and culture, that I truly understood what my purpose was on this planet. I wanted to make a difference and whether that was starting a blog, or waving the Marcus Garvey african flag on my corner for hours to inspire people to keep going, I was going to do it. For a while it worked, until I started receiving backlash and being called names like “that crazy muslim boy”. Over the years, due to how passionate I was about my dream and the dream I had for the community I grew up in, there were many times I never got the mentorship, or the guidance that a young man like myself needed at the time. While there were several older leaders who could have taken me under their wing to help mold me, I had to learn the ropes myself. Every aspect of running a nonprofit, from the grant writing, to the budgeting, to the operational and administrative aspects, to the verbiage in corporate spaces, my team had to learn as we naturally progressed. Now today, we are proud partners with a number of national brands, have achieved national media coverage on several occasions and have truly carved an exquisite reputation in our field.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

It matters what people think of me. As a public figure, it took me years to understand that my work and career are separate from who I am as an individual. For the longest time, I would place this magnifying glass around everything I did to make sure absolutely nothing would ruin anyone’s opinion of my work, based off something I may have been going through personally. So I swallowed my feelings, emotions, and mental health for a while to please everyone but myself. So I definitely understand that feeling. “But if I fail,” you may protest, “people will think badly of me!” This horrible feeling causes despair, suicide, homicide. I realized this when I read blatant lies about myself on the internet and even in the TMZ comments after I was the victim of a vehicular assault during our peaceful George Floyd protest. When I broke down and shared this to a friend, she said, “Wow, you have some painful fantasies about other people’s fantasies about you.” Yup, my anguish came from my hypothesis that other people’s hypothetical hypotheses about me mattered. Ridiculous! Right now, imagine what you’d do if it absolutely didn’t matter what people thought of you. Got it? Good. Never go back. No be a winner.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.chponline.org
• Instagram: communityhealingproject
• Facebook: community healing project inc
• Twitter: chponline386
• Youtube: community healing project inc
• Yelp: community healin project inc