CHERRY HILL, Md. — A beloved Cherry Hill community leader has spent decades improving and serving her community, and now she is being honored with a documentary that showcases her life and legacy.
Kin "Termite" Lane-Brown has lived in the Cherry Hill community for over 50 years, and in that time she has made a lasting impact on many people in the community.
From working at the Patapsco Recreation Center to being a Safe Streets worker for a time, she has been able to foster unique relationships with many people in Cherry Hill, changing lives and sometimes saving them.
Providing food, mentorship, guiding the youth and many other selfless acts has made Termite a role model in her community.
"My love language is giving, my family's love language is giving we have been giving to this community forever this is not just Cherry Hill to me, this is home," Lane-Brown said.
Earlier this month, there was a screening of a short documentary all about Termite's life and impact.
It's part of a larger project called the Guardians of Baltimore which highlights many Black women in the community doing similar work.
The documentary gives people a glimpse of Termite's impact through the voices of people whose lives she has changed.
"More than anything it reinforces the strength and power Black women have always had in their community regardless of the credit they receive for it," said Kirby Griffin, director of "Termite: A Baltimore Story."
Termite says her work in the community was never about recognition. It is simply an act of love for the place she grew up in.
"It felt amazing it felt like my story could help someone else," Lane-Brown said.
Director Griffin says sharing these types of stories is important to show Baltimore neighborhoods are not always what they seem from the outside.
"At the end of the day this was seen as a dangerous neighborhood to a certain degree so this wasn't a place that people really came around and did things in let alone take it upon themselves with no money to try to redevelop and fix the community," Griffin said.
Even today Termite is still working to bring together members of her community. Her focus now is uniting youth with elders in the community with the hope of giving young people a brighter future.
"All the youth are not bad and seniors are not forgotten so it's amazing that I can bring something so unique that not many are doing," Lane-Brown said.
She is also hosting a community toy drive in December at the Marketplace to continue supporting families in Cherry Hill.
Because of her endless service, Griffin says he plans to extend the documentary to share more of Termite's legacy.
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