Award-winning filmmaker William Feagins Jr. was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has since made his home right here in Atlanta, Georgia.

Feagins love for and connection with Atlanta inspired him to start a series more than six years ago to document the communities that he is most intimately tied into. 

“Our Voices, Our Lives,” hosted on YouTube, chronicles the journeys of Atlanta’s Black and brown entrepreneurial and creative class. The series recently won the Best Web Series Award at Atlanta’s BronzeLens Awards, and Feagins himself was presented with the very first BronzeLens Georgia Filmmaker Award for his achievements in sharing important stories.

“City Lights” producer Jacob Smulian recently chatted with Feagins about his work with Atlanta’s creative class and “Our Voices, Our Lives.”

The series originally started as a pilot for a DC public access cable channel, and while it never ended up making it to air, Feagins continued documenting the journeys of his creative and entrepreneurial peers and posting the results on YouTube.

Six years later, the series has hit its 82nd episode, with no real end in sight. The project has been a labor of love and tenacity for Feagins, who spends his free time recording and editing new episodes.

“I work full time, so I primarily film the interviews on weekends and then I do all the editing after work or on a weekend,” he shared about his dedication to the show.

His introduction to Atlanta’s creative scene came after he moved to the city in 2009, and he explained to Smulian that the first community that he came across in the city was “the spoken word community, [but] all communities have a lot of overlap. So through that, I found a hip hop community, and through that, I found the arts community – because there’s a lot of people who play in all those fields.”

You can find more about Feagins and his incredible work at his website here.

Some residents came together to remember the life of an environmental official after his sudden death last week. Kenny Johnson, who was the county’s soil and water conservation district supervisor, collapsed shortly after speaking at a public forum lawmakers hosted at the state Capitol about the BioLab chemical fire.

This week, over 9,000 Atlanta residents laced up their walking shoes and gathered at Atlantic Station for the 26th annual Making Strides Against Breast Cancer Walk.

The walking event, hosted by the American Cancer Society, successfully raised nearly $750,000 in support of breast cancer research.

In addition to raising money for a good cause, the annual walk also honored and commemorated the hundreds of “breast cancer survivors, thrivers, and caregivers” that were in attendance, said the American Cancer Society in a press release.

“More than 313,510 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed in the United States in 2024, including 9,840 here in Georgia,” said Lisa Obser, senior development manager for the American Cancer Society. “This event is a moving example of how we can make huge progress to help end breast cancer as we know it, for everyone.”

The Making Strides Against Cancer event was founded back in 1984 by breast cancer survivor Margery Gould Rath in Massachusetts.

Each year, the “walk-a-thon” accumulates money to fund groundbreaking breast cancer studies, along with providing crucial support services for patients such as free rides to treatment, complimentary lodging and access to the American Cancer Society’s 24/7 cancer helpline.

According to the American Cancer Society, over the past 30 years, Making Strides Against Breast Cancer events nationwide have raised around $1 billion in funding — which has coincided with breast cancer mortality rates decreasing by 44% since 1989.

The American Cancer Society says that donations for the event are still being accepted and can be made at www.MakingStridesWalk.org/Atlanta.