00:00:49.980If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:00:55.400Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:04.060Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:02:52.640And as our producer Mike can tell you, I've probably never been more nervous to speak to a guest.0.99
00:02:57.140Bridget, I have seen you prepare to interview some badass women who are, like, not to be fooled with.0.92
00:03:04.180And I've also seen you prepare to go on talk radio programs with, like, conservative assholes who are, like, hostile to your point of view.0.70
00:03:17.500And I have never seen you be more nervous than when you interviewed Miss Estella.0.95
00:03:25.840Oh, I mean, the woman is an icon. She's a legend.
00:03:29.860And first of all, I mean, just being a Black woman who grew up in the South, when you're talking to a Black elder, there is a whole different level of respect and scrutiny that you need to show.
00:03:42.340Notice how I only refer to Mrs. Stella as Mrs. Stella.
00:03:46.400And so that was one reason why I was just right off the bat very nervous.
00:03:50.600You know, this is an elder in our community, and so you really have to show a certain level of deference and respect.
00:03:56.160And, you know, if I was interviewing somebody like a Mark Zuckerberg, I could do that in my sleep.
00:04:02.540Interviewing Miss Estella was a completely different story.
00:04:06.380And also just the fact that I get very nervous when I'm interviewing somebody that I deeply respect.
00:04:11.320And I so deeply, deeply respect Miss Estella and her work and her legacy and just the incredible life that she lived.
00:04:18.600And I felt such a deep responsibility to do her story justice because her story is incredible.
00:04:25.000You know, this is somebody who really lived an important life.
00:04:37.780I think one of the things that struck me is reading her obituary, how her family talked about how a lot of people thought that her making The Brilliant Bus was her second act, but it was really more like her third or fourth act.
00:04:48.920And so I just really respect that she was someone who never felt like she was too old to start something that she wanted to do, never felt like she was too old to impact her community, never felt like she was too old to really, like, live her legacy.
00:05:00.840And so I just respect her story so much.
00:05:04.620Yeah, you got to respect and love that third act.
00:05:07.500Miss Estella's family says they're going to try to keep her brilliant bus alive to continue connecting residents of all ages to vital technology.
00:05:15.120And you can go to tangody.com slash bus to donate.
00:05:18.480Miss Estella leaves behind four children, three of whom are educators like their mama,
00:05:23.44013 grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and countless others that she touched, myself very
00:05:28.940much included. Miss Estella, you are an icon. Let's listen to her story. So in true nerd fashion,
00:05:35.760I have a birthday on Pi Day, this weekend on March 14th. And to celebrate, I wanted to honor
00:05:41.140one of my heroes, Estella Pifrome. You might have seen her story in a Super Bowl commercial in 2015.
00:05:48.340Ms. Estella spent 50 years in public education, serving low-income kids in a Title I school.
00:05:54.340Now, while teaching, she saw that many of her kids couldn't always do their assignments0.74
00:05:58.240because they didn't have access to a computer or reliable internet at home.0.63
00:06:02.320So she created Estella's Brilliant Bus to bring the computers to them.
00:06:06.500My name is Estella. I'm the owner, the creator, and founder of Estella's Brilliant Bus.
00:06:14.440The Stella's Brilliant Bus is a mobile learning center where we provide education and technology for underserved communities, to children in underserved communities.
00:06:28.220And that's what we've been doing since we started, but realizing that the children have other siblings and other relatives that need our service.
00:06:40.760we have expanded our service to include not just children, but adults in underserved communities.
00:06:49.700That's what the Brilliant Bus is all about. It's not just a tech center. It's a learning center
00:06:54.440where we use the bus to provide the technology to accomplish the mission that we set out to do
00:07:01.400in the communities. After retiring in her 70s, Mrs. Dallas spent her life savings on a bus
00:07:07.180that she turned into a mobile learning center to help bridge the digital divide
00:07:11.080and help bring technology to the communities who need it most.
00:07:14.140Knowing that I was getting older and I was pretty much, I would say, well over seven through one,
00:07:21.940I knew that if I was going to do anything other than work at the school,
00:07:27.680I needed to look at what that option might be.
00:07:30.840And when the hurricane devastated all the people in New Orleans and other places,
00:07:39.340it sharpened my idea about going out into communities
00:07:44.480and doing something that I thought would be worthwhile.
00:07:48.840I had the idea of creating something to take out into communities,
00:07:54.320but put it on hold because I wasn't really sure what I was going to do.
00:08:01.140But after that hurricane, I thought about, this is it.
00:08:05.340According to Pew, a quarter of lower-income teens don't have access to a home computer.
00:08:10.560And one quarter of Black youth said they often or sometimes can't do their homework assignments
00:08:14.800because they don't have reliable internet access or a computer.
00:08:18.180Compare that to just 13% of white youth.
00:08:20.900This is sometimes called the digital divide,
00:08:22.720and it presents a big barrier to kids in all communities being able to succeed.
00:08:26.600I figured if I could create a project that I could take out into the community,
00:08:33.220because we knew that this was age of technology.
00:08:37.020And I knew from working with Title I schools that there was that digital divide.
00:08:43.920So I wanted to keep that going because I know as far as our communities are concerned, that we serve the children that attended the Title I school was missing at home the technology.
00:09:02.180Mrs. Stella was relentless, and she also dreamed big.0.74
00:09:05.220Her first thought was to use her old minivan, and she even toyed with the idea of trying to get her hands on a semi-truck to turn that into a mobile computer lab.
00:09:13.920So in putting my ideas together, the first thing I asked myself,
00:09:19.560how can I provide technology to these underserved communities?
00:09:25.240And I've been thinking about it a while.
00:09:28.600I knew that the band that I had would not be enough
00:09:33.180because it was just not big enough to serve more than four or five children
00:13:14.540but they were very smart and hardworking people.
00:13:18.820Growing up poor in a government housing project,
00:13:21.560Ms. Estella knew that not much was expected of her,
00:13:23.820But the power of community helped her subvert those low expectations.
00:13:53.820And a smaller percentage of us would probably not make it to college because we would be stuck in that rut and that government project.
00:14:06.640But I'm proud to say that many of us who went to school out there, graduated from high school, went to college, and obtained advanced degrees.
00:14:22.420Now, in the project where I lived, it was the ideal of it takes a village to raise a child.