Soulful Softball Sunday Participants talk fun,life and Richmond,CA

Many think it's just a softball game and black folks eating food,NAW it's more than any human can imagine when a Mother apologizes to the Mother who son was killed by her son.THAT'S HEALING AND IT'S TAKING PLACE EVERY WEEKEND AT SOULFUL SOFTBALL SUNDAY.... A new weekly softball game in Nichol Park is shaking up neighborhood boundaries with a radical idea: everyone -- from every part of Richmond -- is invited to play and hang out in the same place without fear of cross-town violence.
“My inbox is flooded with messages from guys in different parts of town,” explains Rodney Alamo Brown, co-organizer of the Soulful Softball Sundays event.
“They say to me, ‘Rodney, I really want to come, but guys from the other side of town are trippin’ and I don’t want to be a sitting duck and get ambushed’,” Brown says.
Soulful Softball Sundays was started by Brown and Antoine Cloird of Men and Women of Purpose to resolve exactly this sort of conflict. What appears at first to be a family-friendly softball game in a park is actually more of a one-stop-shop for community healing.
“How do we lead the horse to the water? That’s what we had to figure out,” Brown explains. “How do you get people to the mental health services they need? How do you peel back the layers of fear people have about leaving their own neighborhood? We said, ‘Let’s take people back to when they were eight-years-old and they had no worries in the world.’ These games are like a reunion of sorts.”
When Brown and Cloird grew up in Richmond, Nichol Park was the spot to play baseball in the city. The two are trying to recreate the innocent playground of their youth, and they invite all of Richmond to join in.
“We’re not handing out pamphlets, we’re just talking with people,” Cloird explains. The most important part about Soulful Softball Su