True Foundation Outreach Center

True Foundation Outreach Center A 501C3 non-profit organization in Columbus MS providing wrap around services for youth, families and returning citizens back into the community.

05/07/2026

Kim Hamilton, born Dorothy Mae Aiken, was a gifted actress, writer, director, and visual artist whose career quietly broke barriers in American entertainment for more than five decades.
Born on September 12, 1932, in Los Angeles, Hamilton entered the industry during an era when opportunities for Black performers were severely limited. Yet through talent, dignity, and persistence, she built a career that stretched from the early 1950s to 2010.
Her early screen appearances included the acclaimed noir drama Odds Against Tomorrow, where she appeared opposite Harry Belafonte, and the cult horror film The Leech Woman. These performances helped establish her as a versatile actress capable of moving between drama and genre cinema.
Hamilton was also a television pioneer. She became one of the first African American performers to appear on the long-running soap opera Days of Our Lives, helping open doors in daytime television. She also made history as the only African American actor to appear in a speaking role on Leave It to Beaver.
One of her most historically significant roles came in To Kill a Mockingbird, the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Hamilton portrayed Helen Robinson, wife of Tom Robinson, in an uncredited role. Though small in screen time, her presence was part of one of the most important civil rights-era films in American cinema.
Beyond acting, Hamilton expressed herself through writing, directing, and art, showing a creative spirit that extended far beyond the camera. She continued working and creating into later life, leaving behind a legacy of endurance and quiet excellence.
Kim Hamilton passed away on September 16, 2013, at age 81. Though not always given the spotlight she deserved, she remains an important trailblazer whose work helped expand representation in Hollywood and television.

05/07/2026

Before she became a legendary R&B star, Florence LaRue won a beauty pageant in a town that. Black Americans built from scratch just to safely swim.

In this 1965 photograph, future 5th Dimension founder Florence LaRue and AAU Mr. Los Angeles Bradley Polk are crowned the winners of the Miss Val Verde and Muscleman competitions. But the stage they are standing on holds the real history.

In the 1920s and 30s, “De Facto” segregation, restrictive housing covenants, and hostile police harassment locked Black Californians out of the state’s booming public beaches and municipal pools. Instead of fighting for access to hostile spaces, a group of Black entrepreneurs pooled their money, bought 1,000 acres in the Santa Clarita Valley, and established the town of Val Verde.

They built their own sanctuary. At its center was a massive 53-acre park and a $125,000 Olympic-sized swimming pool. Known as the “Black Palm Springs,” Val Verde attracted over 10,000 visitors every summer. It became an economic powerhouse and a safe haven where working-class families and Black Hollywood elites could hold events and relax without the looming threat of racial violence. They didn’t wait for integration; they bought the land and built the infrastructure themselves.

05/07/2026

Dr. Dóminique Kemp was the only Black student in his math PhD program — he made it to Princeton anyway.In May 2021, Dr. Dóminique Kemp became the first Black person to earn a PhD in mathematics from Indiana University. He achieved this milestone as the only Black student in his program — navigating a doctoral process in isolation that most PhD candidates at least share across a broader community of peers who reflect their identity and experience. He had no predecessor in that specific department whose path he could follow or whose presence confirmed that the door was open.He went through it anyway. Then he went to Princeton.His postdoctoral work has taken him to Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study — one of the most prestigious research environments in mathematics globally, an institution whose alumni include Albert Einstein and where appointment signals recognition at the highest level of the field. The trajectory from being the only Black PhD student in his Indiana University program to postdoctoral researcher at Princeton and IAS is not a small arc.The advocacy dimension of his story runs alongside the academic achievement. Dr. Kemp has been vocal about the need for diversity in STEM fields — not simply as a matter of representation aesthetics but as a matter of the field's own intellectual health. Mathematical research conducted within a demographically narrow community produces blind spots. The perspectives brought by researchers from different backgrounds, communities, and life experiences expand what questions get asked and how they get approached.He was the first Black PhD in mathematics from Indiana University. He is now at Princeton. The isolation he navigated on the way there is the context that makes both facts matter simultaneously.He broke the first. Then he went to one of the best. Both achievements belong in the same sentence.

05/07/2026

LeVar Burton is aging gracefully, he’s 69. 🙏🏿❤️

05/07/2026

Thats love and looking out for a friend.

05/07/2026

A mother founded a water bottling company after being inspired by her children during the pandemic — and the story of how Paulla McCarthy arrived at YSS Water Works is one where the motivation is as significant as the enterprise itself.The pandemic created a particular kind of pressure on parents — the sustained presence with their children that remote learning and lockdown conditions produced, the conversations and observations that proximity over months generated, the specific moments in which children said or did something that shifted how their parents saw a problem they had not previously considered their own to solve.For Paulla McCarthy, that proximity to her children during an extraordinary period produced the inspiration that led her to take ownership of a water bottling company. The specifics of what her children showed her — what need they identified, what question they asked, what moment clarified the connection between something she could do and something that needed doing — is the origin story of YSS Water Works.She is also the founder and CEO of Youth Saving Society — an organization whose name signals a focus on young people and community investment that runs through both of her ventures. The water company and the nonprofit are not disconnected projects. They reflect a coherent vision of what it means to build something that serves your community while building something that sustains your ability to do so.Her children inspired her. She built something real from that inspiration.The pandemic produced an enormous amount of loss and disruption. It also created the conditions for conversations and observations that would not otherwise have happened — and in some cases, as in Paulla McCarthy's, those conversations became the foundation for something lasting.

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Columbus, MS
39704

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+16625497717

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