Activist Proud of Getting Hospital in Poinciana
GREG PARLIER / LEDGER MEDIA GROUP
POINCIANA | Sand castles wouldn’t stand much of a chance against a bulldozer.
Poinciana naysayers don’t stand much of a chance against Annette Brown-Best.
The 71-year-old Poinciana activist has fought for more parks, more schools, better public transportation, more roads and more commercial development for her community since she arrived in 2003.
Before Brown-Best started becoming a fixture at Polk County Commission meetings, Poinciana wasn’t even on the map.
“They had us as urban. We’re not urban. We’re Poinciana,” she said.
But her greatest achievement to date is helping lure a hospital, the Poinciana Medical Center to the sprawling, nearly 80,000-person suburban unincorporated community on the Polk and Osceola county line.
After she organized meetings, picketing and writing letters to state representatives, Gov. Rick Scott called her in to speak to a Senate committee to show why Poinciana needed a hospital. Eventually, it was approved and the hospital opened in July.
“We would not be where we are today without her,” said Fernando Valverde, co-founder with Brown-Best of the group Friends of the Poinciana Hospital, and the one responsible for her nickname.
“We affectionately call her bulldozer. She goes ahead, she overcomes obstacles that are mostly manmade,” he said.
“Annette understands the needs of the community. I personally don’t think the hospital would be there without Annette’s efforts,” said Nick Murdock, president of the Poinciana Economic Development Alliance, who has been to several county commission meetings in Polk and Osceola with Brown-Best fighting for Poinciana.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Annette Brown was born by midwife to Lawrence and Angelia Brown in a tenement house in Harlem, N.Y., on July 4, 1942. She had three brothers and one sister.
From the beginning, she was looking out for her community and was never afraid to call someone out for unjust practices. In elementary school, she felt the teachers were shorting students books.
“In Harlem, they weren’t giving us books to read until we got to the third grade because they said we weren’t able to learn,” she said.
Brown-Best, the youngest of five, already had learned to read from her siblings, and knew that wasn’t true. So she complained to her mother, who only had a third-grade education herself.
“I was always protesting things since I was six years old,” she said.
“I didn’t go to school to be stupid.“
She learned some of her fight-the-man ways from her mother, who was divorced from her father when Annette was young, and who managed a building in New York by herself.
Then, when her mother eventually had to become a renter, and the building became overrun with rats and undesirable tenants, she watched her mother take the landlord to court.
“I never forgot that my mother was able to put a powerful slumlord in jail at Christmas-time. If you stick by your guns, you can get your way,” Brown-Best said.
Later, as an adult, Brown-Best helped organize a rent strike in her building in the Bronx, mobilizing local representatives against another rogue landlord.
IT WASN’T EASY
Brown-Best met her first husband Alfred Nathaniel Brown in 1960, just before graduating high school, and married him in 1962. He was a student at Greensboro A&T College in North Carolina, and was one of the first black citizens to dine at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., as part of nonviolent protests in the civil rights movement.
He had a temper that led to their separation in 1965 after having two kids together. They didn’t get divorced, an expensive and difficult procedure at the time, until 1980.
That left Brown-Best, a young, black woman, to raise her son and daughter by herself in the Bronx. No easy task.
She was able to gain years of valuable experience, working a multitude of jobs, from being a speed typist for Nabisco in the 1960s to real estate, a career field where she spent most of her time.
RETIREMENT? WHAT RETIREMENT?
Brown-Best moved to Poinciana in 2003 with her second husband, Glensford Best, after his diabetes compelled them to make a lifestyle change and leave New York City in October 2002.
They moved into their new home in Village 5 in Poinciana in November 2003 to retire. At least that was the idea. But with some unexpected costs related to the new house, and her husband ill, Brown-Best had to get back to work.
In 2005, she retired again, but she’s never really slowed down.
“Frankly, I’m tired. I don’t want to keep doing this. I came here to retire, not to do activist stuff like I did in New York. I didn’t come here for that. But yet, what happens if I don’t speak up?“
Val Ramos, the leader of PINCHOS, the group pushing for incorporation in Poinciana, said that without Brown-Best’s involvement, Poinciana wouldn’t be where it is today.
“She’s involved in so many things here, she’s just a dynamo. Without her, in my opinion we would still be scratching the surface on a lot of projects we’re trying to push through,” he said.
’THEY KEEP PULLING ME BACK’
Brown-Best doesn’t drive, so working for a colleague in Kissimmee meant lots of driving for her husband, whom she lovingly calls “Driving Miss Daisy” after the 1989 film with Morgan Freeman.
But gas was getting expensive, so she started taking the bus. The bus service at the time was infrequent, though, and she got stranded in Kissimmee one night and had to walk three hours to get home.
That’s when she knew she had to get some things fixed in Poinciana.
First, it was better bus service. Then, it was schools. Some students in Village 7 in Poinciana, which is on the Polk County side, are travelling to Dundee for middle school and Haines City for high school because there are no other options in Polk Poinciana.
Brown-Best helped convince Polk County commissioners of Poinciana’s need.
Brown-Best doesn’t even live on the Polk County side of Poinciana, but she said if she doesn’t speak up for people, who will?
“She’s the kind of resident that cares about her community,” said Tony Iorio, vice president of development for AV Homes, who also sits on the board of directors for Poinciana’s giant homeowners association, the Association of Poinciana Villages.
“Every community needs people that care. If you don’t have people that care spearheading projects then there would be a void left.“
But Brown-Best said she can’t do it forever.
“Citizens like us shouldn’t have to go out there and do these things. I am old. We’re both 71 now. We’re spending our social security money on gas to get to Bartow and we have to go over to Osceola County as well. We have two places to go to get anything that we want here,” she said.
The homeowners association or a government should be representing the people, she said, so people like her don’t have to.
But that’s not happening, she said, so she feels the responsibility to keep people informed.
“If I don’t, what happens? Who’s going to know?“
Whether she wants to be people’s voice or not, she’s certainly good at it.
“People trust her. People know she doesn’t misguide them. People know her ability to spread a message articulately and accurately,” Ramos said.
“Annette, I would say, for this community is not just the right hand, she’s the right and the left.”