Season 2, Episode 3: Mutual Aid, Resilience, and the Fight for Justice in Buffalo

Podcast

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April 29, 2025

Featured Image Description: A memorial honoring victims of the TOPS supermarket shooting in Buffalo, New York, serves as a poignant reminder of community resilience and collective mourning. (Photograph by Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Now we need to make sure we have sustainable aid, ongoing. So we had to not only be boots on the ground, but also put on suits and go into boardrooms to tell stakeholders: This crisis isn’t over just because the headlines moved on. – Stephanie Simeon, executive director Heart of the City Neighborhoods

In this episode we hear from Heart of the City Neighborhoods, a Buffalo-based nonprofit responding to the tragic mass shooting at Tops Friendly Market. Executive Director Stephanie J. Simeon shares how her organization, supported by Convergence Partnership alongside other local nonprofits, mobilized mutual aid to provide essential resources, create healing spaces, and support community resilience in the wake of white supremacist violence.

The episode explores the deep historical and cultural significance of Buffalo’s East Side, a neighborhood shaped by the Great Migration and home to generations of Black families. Simeon reflects on the trauma, the systemic conditions that made the community vulnerable, and the power of grassroots organizing in moments of crisis.

This podcast series serves as a final grant report for Convergence Partnership’s most recent grantee cohort. Through the voices of our grantees and their partners, we explore how civic narrative, mutual aid, and economic power shape the fight for racial justice and health equity.

View full transcript for this podcast

Amanda M. Navarro: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Convergence Partnership Podcast. Today our grantees will share their stories on how they are working to improve community health and promote racial justice. The Convergence Partnership is a collaborative of local, statewide, and national funders working to transform policies. Practices and systems to advance racial justice and health equity.

Strong democracies require truth and transparency, which relies on having diverse narratives in the public sphere. Important to this is bringing forth often unheard voices and promoting narratives that champion equity, justice, and democracy.

Stephanie J. Simeon: Folks that came together for the mutual aid and figure out how can we meet people where they are, what can we get them? What is the highest level of need? How can we triage?

Amanda M. Navarro: In this series, our grantees and their community partners bring us such [00:01:00] stories from across the United States. This podcast introduces you to people and organizations who are building civic, narrative and economic power to advance racial justice and health equity.

This series acts as a final report for our most recent grantee cohort. I’m your host, Amanda Navarro, and today we’re hearing from Heart of the City Neighborhoods a Convergence Partnership grantee that is responding to a tragic white supremacist mass shooting. By joining forces with local nonprofits to support the community, we’ll learn how they provided essential resources, created healing spaces, and fostered resilience in the face of trauma.

This episode is produced and hosted by Akshay Gokul.[00:02:00]

Akshay Gokul: On May 14th, 2022, 10 people lost their lives in a racist mass shooting at a Tops Friendly Market located on the east side of Buffalo. The event continues to have a deep impact on the city, but as the community continues to heal, resilience will play a critical role.

Stephanie J. Simeon,: I, I think that one thing that people can never take away from people from Buffalo is that these folks are built Ford tough, right? They have been through some things, and you can take away the racial background, you can take away all those things, everybody still wants the same thing. They want a decent neighborhood. They want a, a good place to eat ’cause we’re known for really good food, um, and they wanna be able to enjoy and love on their families.

Akshay Gokul: In conversation with Stephanie Simeon, the Executive Director of Heart of the City Neighborhoods, an organization working to create and [00:03:00] support housing in Buffalo communities, we learned how the east side, the location of the tragedy is not only home for many, but is also the birthplace for generational prosperity.

Stephanie J. Simeon,: What I think of the east side is grandma’s house. Grandma’s house, right. What are the things that remind you of going to grandma’s house, which is different than the house that you were you were raised in? It’s that, it’s the smell of good cooked food, home cooked food, of you’re okay, you are loved. I know you’re cutting up a little bit, but I still love you no matter what. That sense of what your culture is.

So for, you know, put, put race aside, the main anchor of, uh, of any society is that, is that family and our elders. And this is a tremendous. Community to look at because the elders are there.

Akshay Gokul: Buffalo’s East Side is a predominantly black neighborhood as a result of the great migration that led many here in the 20th [00:04:00] century.

This location is home for much of the history and culture that the city possesses.

Stephanie J. Simeon,: And that’s what I want people to remember about what the East Side is, is that’s the neighborhood that has held it together. No matter what is, where you remember where your roots are. And it just happens to be, you know, areas where, you know, underground railroad and these kind of culturally rich things have happened.

The storytelling, the arts and culture, food experiences. I, I know a lot of people who are my white colleagues, they started out their urban planning and housing careers in those neighborhoods in the east side in Maston, because that’s where you could find those kind of homes that needed that kind of care.

That’s how you, that’s how you started. And so you don’t wanna forget neighborhoods like that because that’s where you start and that’s where, where you end.[00:05:00]

Akshay Gokul: The person who was responsible for carrying out the mass shooting did so with the intention of targeting black Americans. So as many continued to reflect in the aftermath of the event, it was difficult to truly comprehend the fact that the person was able to choose the east side for producing such an egregious injustice.

Stephanie J. Simeon: When they looked at the research behind the person who had, who had did all the, who did the massacre, he initially was looking at schools. But he felt that because the schools were too guarded, he wasn’t able to get a clear shot, he figured this was the best place to go to because it was only one grocery store, and it would give you more people of color en mass.

And the fact that someone who wasn’t from the area was able to figure that out just because of the geography and and, and how we have allowed this neighborhood to be so distressed, it’s a shame. Because no one should be able to figure out, well, that’s all [00:06:00] that they have. That’s the, that’s where most of them would congregate.

And he would, and they didn’t lie because that’s what happened. And on a Saturday at that.

Akshay Gokul: For those in Buffalo, many hold a story of where they were at the time of the tragedy. And for Stephanie, her story is proximate to the site of the shooting.

Stephanie J. Simeon,: We do at Heart of the City Neighborhoods at that time is that we had a workforce development component and for that specific day for our workforce development, we were doing storm water management and areas like the east side happened to have a lot of flooding issues and there was a big rain the day before. So my workforce development crews were out there actually, um, near the Jefferson Avenue site. It’s a site known for a lot of flooding and making it difficult for people to cross the street and the whole thing. So they were out there actually doing, doing training. They were, um, two blocks down from where the massacre happened.

They were saying, there’s something going, going on. There’s a lot of, [00:07:00] there’s a lot of noise. I said, I don’t know what’s going on, but everybody just go home. Just maybe that’s a sign to, to go home. Five minutes after that, it was all over the place. It was all over the place. At the time that I found out about it, it was actively still going on. They were actively shooting.

Akshay Gokul: The events at the Top’s Supermarket elicited complex emotions and trauma for those in Buffalo.

Stephanie J. Simeon,: What was challenging for me was that this entire time, when I moved to Buffalo in 1998, people had always said that, right? That this, this was a racial area. I never experienced it, and even when the massacre happened that particular day, I still personally was not there. I didn’t experience.

My experience from that day forward has been completely different. I now move through spaces differently. When I go to restaurants, I’m like, am the only black person here. Uh, what I did notice mostly with it being racialized, is [00:08:00] that other black people’s response to it and other white people who were considered allies, which was, were like, well, things happen over there in that neighborhood anyway, where people, you know, you shoot your own people, you know all the time. And people sort of living into that narrative and that that hurt. That hurt to the core, which was like, what does one have to do with the other and survival versus someone being a, like a, a terrorist attack? Like you, you should be able to see the difference and just the way that people talked about the neighborhood. Which just like, well, you know, this place is a dump. And, and, and look at this. Well, no wonder this was like a target, like, you know, people saying, well, it looks like a, a bomb blew off. Or Beirut, or, I serve my country and, and I went to these places and it looked like Iraq. And I’m thinking, people live here. People raise their families here, people worship and, and do stuff here[00:09:00]

Akshay Gokul: On the ground in Buffalo. Following the tragedy, tragedy, many face difficulties in processing the trauma of the events while also doing what they need to survive. In witnessing this, Stephanie, along with other nonprofit leaders rose up to use mutual aid to meet the needs of the community.

Stephanie J. Simeon,: We paid the first rent, uh, so the rent of June. If you had utilities that need to be covered, we did that. We offered you food, gift cards, um, not to Tops, but to other places because unfortunately, for two weeks after the massacre, people of color were not allowed to go grocery shopping. There was some copy, I don’t know what you call it, but some copycat threats right after that, saying that if they saw people of color in Walmart, Wegman’s, into other places, because they knew naturally that’s what happened. Since we can’t go to Tops, we gotta clearly go to other grocery stores to get our food. Um, so Wegman’s, Walmart, Target, all those places started [00:10:00] closing really early. And I myself had, um, my neighbors who are um, white, pick up groceries and stuff for me because of the fear of that. And I had some of my white colleagues do the same.

So we were giving them grocery cards to go to other places so they can still get food. So that was something that they weren’t worried about. But the folks that came together for the mutual aid and figure out how can we meet people where they are, what can we get them? What is the highest level of need? How can we triage? Because in many cases, people were coming up with GoFundMe, people had to, to do the burials. People, sometimes you couldn’t even get to the bodies because it was still under investigation and all these kind of things were happening, but the community still needed to move, you know, continue to move forward.

And my colleagues, you know. They came together and was just like, what this is, this is what we’ve been training for. Like we, we all have gone through this. We knew about mutual aid. Um, we knew how to, to, to, to, to [00:11:00] mobilize people. We knew what, what triage was. We knew how to make sure that it was culturally appropriate. We knew what, what trees to shake to say, hey, you, you pull this together. We were literally, there was no way that we could have covered the staff time that it took to be able to triage. We had people there around the clock.

Akshay Gokul: Stephanie sees that building a robust mutual aid system is critical to building a more resilient Buffalo for tomorrow.

Stephanie J. Simeon,: Now we need to make sure we have sustainable aid ongoing, because it’s not just gonna be the June 1st rent. July still coming and Tops didn’t open up I think until around, um, maybe September or August. Those are several months that people went without being paid. So they still had needs that needed to be met.

So we had to make sure that in addition to us being sort of boots on the ground dealing with that one, but we also had to be, you know, put on a suit and go into those boardroom meetings of saying to the stakeholders and the trustees, Hey guys, this is not just gonna be happening in, in, in 90 [00:12:00] days. We still need some other things. We need you, the government to kind of put some things in place so that people are gonna be okay.

Amanda M. Navarro: You’ve been listening to the Convergence Partnership Podcast, where we hear stories from our grantees across the country who are working to create racial justice and health equity broadcasting from the Gulf Coast of Chicago. To the San Joaquin Valley, to Buffalo and places in between learning how our network is amplifying civic, narrative and economic power toward a healthy and inclusive democracy. To learn more about the Convergence partnership, visit [email protected]. That is www convergence partnership.org. Stay tuned as we continue telling the stories of our work. I’m Amanda Navarro, Executive Director of Convergence Partnership. Thanks for [00:13:00] listening.

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors. Please refer to the audio recording for accuracy.

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