Jada Pinkett-Smith Greatly Praises Son Jaden's Effort to Provide Clean Water for Flint Residents
Jada Pinkett-Smith couldn’t be prouder of her son for his philanthropical efforts. The 20-year-old rapper has joined forces with a local church to help provide Flint, Michigan, with clean water. The city has been facing a water crisis due to the contamination of their primary water source for the past five years.
Jaden Smith is known for his wild fashion choices, his acting gigs, and most recently, his rising career as a rapper. However, the young man has proved he cares about the environment and is working hard to create sustainable alternatives to make the world a better place.
As part of his efforts, Jaden recently teamed up with the First Trinity Missionary Baptist Church through his organization 501CTHREE, and his eco-friendly bottled water company JUST, to develop a mobile water filtration system known as The Water Box.
The system was unveiled on a private launch at First Trinity Missionary Baptist Church last weekend. Jaden was accompanied by his mom, Jada Pinkett-Smith, who took the chance to praise her son for the initiative through an Instagram post.
Pinkett-Smith shared a series of pics, including one of The Water Box, and others posing with Jaden, church leaders Catrina and Ezra Tillman, and more people involved in the project.
She captioned the post:
“@c.syresmith I really enjoyed our trip to Flint yesterday where I witnessed you unveil your first water filtration system to First Trinity Church. Your desire to innovate to help Flint have access to clean water makes me so proud.
Thank you, First Trinity and @ladi_tillman and @ezratillman for trusting my son and his team enough to serve the community of Flint through your church. #flintwillnotbeforgotten.”
According to First Trinity Water website, The Water Box uses a 4 stage filtration process designed to filter out several types of heavy metals, sediments, and bacteria from Flint’s water. The system was created and engineered by the church with the help of Jaden’s organization, as well as The Last Kilometer, Rethink H2O and Black Millennials for Flint.
Flint’s water crisis began in 2014, when the city's water source was switched from the Detroit River to the Flint River, causing city-wide contamination of the drinking water when lead started to leak from pipes after the state failed to treat them to reduce corrosion adequately.
Jaden is the first celebrity to put words into actions to help Flint through their water crisis. Last September, Whoopi Goldberg revealed that the late Aretha Franklin was upset about the situation and had asked her friend, Judge Greg Mathis, to take care of it.
However, nothing more was said or done by the stars, leaving the local church to keep providing water to citizens among the crisis.
First Trinity Missionary Baptist Church has distributed over 5 million water bottles to residents, according to the AP, but ever since the state of Michigan ended its free water program in the spring of 2018, donations of bottled water have started to decrease.
The Water Box will allow the church to provide up to 10 gallons of water per minute. They are asking people to bring their own water jugs and if possible, donate water jugs for filling.
“This has been one of the most rewarding and educational experiences for me personally," Smith said. And continued:
"Working together with people in the community experiencing the problems and design(ing) something to help them has been a journey I will never forget. We are planning to deploy more water boxes in Flint and other communities facing similar challenges."
Flint residents can check the website to verify the test results of the, carried by an independent and certified laboratory with no association to the Flint state.
The First Trinity Water service times are currently Tuesday-Thursday from 10Am-2PM.