The Greater Mattapan Neighborhood Council (GMNC) welcomed Boston Globe columnist and editor Jeneé Osterheldt to its April meeting to talk on the theme of building resilience and community in Mattapan.

Osterheldt, a senior assistant managing editor for culture, talent, and development, appeared at the online meeting to detail her work in the Globe series of columns entitled ‘A Beautiful Resistance,’ which she said was conceived on a flight back to Boston after she had covered George Floyd’s funeral in 2020.

The series of columns and its editorial and promotional offshoots cater to the Black community, she said, and is “our space specifically for joy,” about telling stories not of suffering and deficit, but of “love, joy, and everyday existence and being.”

A native of Virginia who attended Norfolk State University, Osterheldt joined the Globe staff in 2018 after spending a year as a Neiman Fellow at Harvard University.

She told the gathering that she is inspired by the communities she writes about and the people in them – particularly Mattapan and Dorchester.

“Boston is a lot like the Celtics,” she said. “We are on the precipice of promise, possibilities, and progress. I look at our young people and how they’re moving as a collective and how they understand that our Blackness is not a monolith, and we can work together in our Blackness.

“When I see the way we’re all rising and persisting and heading toward who we know we can be, it gives me great joy and promise and optimism,” she said.

As to her position at the Globe, Osterheldt, while noting that the company has gone on a recent hiring spree to bring in talented young writers of color, used the occasion to give her view of those readers of the Globe who threaten her via emails and personal phone calls.

“Here’s the truth; our subscribers are like 90 percent old and white,” she said. “That’s just a very real thing…I write a lot of things that they don’t want to hear, that they are very loud and angry and happy to say so with their names attached. They’re not anonymous. They’re very like boldly, defiantly, hateful, racist, and verbally violent and threatening.” She said that many want to take her platform away and keep her from “using my voice to celebrate us.”

In answering a question from the audience, she said she pushes on because of the good that’s done by her work. “I stay motivated because I see the difference it makes in various peoples’ lives and that it matters. If it didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be so loud and angry.”

MATTAPAN NOTEBOOK
•The Mattapan Community Yard Sale will take place on Sat., May 6, from noon to 6 p.m., in the Mildred Avenue School parking lot. Previously, the sale had been pegged for April 22, but it was moved due to school vacation week. Tables and chairs are not provided. For more information email psc.gmnc@gmail.com.

•Azan Reid reported that he and the youth from the Mattapan Teen Center will be having a community cleanup on April 24. All are invited to help.

•The Edgewater Neighborhood Association and the Neponset River Watershed Association will co-host a Spring Cleanup of the Neponset River areas on Earth Day, April 22, from 9 a.m. to noon. Meet at 640 River St.

•For the second month in a row, hosting duties at the GMNC were handed off to other board members. On April 3, Neldine Torres took the lead and put together a very organized and efficient meeting. The next session is set for May 1 at 6:30 p.m. online.

•On May 13, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. there will be a grand opening of the Edgewater Food Forest, 640 River St., with the Boston Food Forest Coalition. The space has been converted from a derelict city-owned lot into a thriving food forest. Organizers said all fruits and nuts in the food forest are available to anyone in the community when they are ripe.

•Former staffer Chris Westfall of state Rep. Brandy Fluker Oakley’s office has moved on to a position with the Ways and Means Committee in the State House. Fluker Oakley said she is looking for a new legislative aide and is taking applications.