When Billy Palmer received the Dorothy Richardson Award for Resident Leadership in 2015, he was a board member for NeighborWorks Salt Lake and chairman of the organization’s YouthWorks committee. Palmer had been involved with the program since he was 16, when he went to court for noncompliance. He was sentenced to detention, but his probation officer argued for a second chance. He took Palmer straight from the courtroom to YouthWorks, a NeighborWorks Salt Lake program that helps youth gain leadership, employment and life skills, while helping the community.
“It was YouthWorks that first taught me about doing community good,” Palmer recalls. At the time, Maria Garciaz, now CEO of NeighborWorks Salt Lake, led the program.
Palmer was all nerves as he wrote his speech to accept the Dorothy Richardson award six years ago. He was nervous as he approached the podium to deliver the speech in Louisville, Kentucky. He worried about his voice crackling and about forgetting what he was going to say about community involvement. He preferred to be behind the scenes, he says, not in the spotlight. “I’d been a part of many teams,” he recalls. “I could think of a dozen people in the neighborhood who deserved that award more than me.”
After the ceremony, he returned to Utah and to his job as a board member and as a supervisor at Costco. Then he got a call, asking if he would appear on a local public affairs radio show to talk about receiving the award, named for Dorothy Richardson, a pioneer in community-based development and the driving force behind teh establishment of Pittsburgh's Neighborhood Housing Services Inc., a forerunner of the NeighborWorks network. At first, Palmer was reluctant to do it. When you get an award, he says, the idea is not to hang on to the honor. “It’s to go back home and continue the work.” But he agreed to go on and talk about his experience as a kid who seemed destined for the school-to-prison pipeline.
During the show, RadioACTive with Lara Jones, Palmer addressed the disparity in punishment and reformative measures for students. “A lot of time, it differentiates according to skin color,” he says. “We have a problem with how we punish children altogether and specifically with who gets punitive and who gets reformative justice across the country. It was obvious things needed to change.
“It was personal for me because as a Black person, I experienced harsh punishment as a teenager differently from my white friends. Luckily, I had a probation officer and a case worker and a social worker and therapist who believed in me. That’s the only reason I survived it.”
As he talked, Palmer spoke about NeighborWorks and YouthWorks and – eventually – about the Dorothy Richardson award. It was a good, in-depth conversation, he says. The radio station, KRCL, told him to come back to help spotlight others in the community. “Anytime,” he told them.
Soon, “anytime” became “all the time.” Palmer became a volunteer co-host on KRCL, then a part-time co-host. In 2018, he left his job at Costco and began working for the program full time as a lead host, associate producer and director of civic engagement for RadioACTive.
On air, he focuses on grass roots activism and community involvement. He works on 260 shows a year, highlighting nonprofits and community activists and the work they do in Utah.
“I consider it community organizing and activism with a microphone instead of a megaphone, and I now can advocate for a multitude of issues where equity and humanity are lacking,” he says.
The program’s audience fluctuates between 20,000 to 60,000 on any given night. Palmer says he never thought he would be able to make a living talking about and doing the things he cared about most. The Dorothy Richardson award changed that.
Recently, Palmer served as president NeighborWorks Salt Lake’s board of directors, the first former YouthWorks student to do so. After an additional two years on the board as president emeritus, his term ended. His community engagement did not. He continues to engage the community through his radio program and he continues to work with Youthworks. In September, he received the Pillar of Hope award from a local rape recovery center for addressing sexual violence, rape culture and toxic masculinity on RadioACTive in a series of conversations.
“All my life, I’ve felt the need to give back,” Palmer says. “Someone threw me a rope when I needed it and I feel I should be doing same. If you know what’s effective in helping people change their lives, I think you have an obligation to do so. Being involved in community work is an attempt to throw the rope back for people to climb themselves.”
Garciaz, of NeighborWorks Salt Lake, says Palmer is an inspiration. “When he was younger, he found his voice,” she says. “I think our youth program helped him find it, helped him understand how one person can make a difference in the community.” Now, Palmer helps other people find their voice. He amplifies it. “It allows them to impact the community.”
RadioACTive airs weeknights at 6 p.m. on KRCL 90.9 FM and on their mobile app KRCL.
06/04/2021
