It's been 50 years since hip-hop culture burst onto the scene in the Bronx. For the past few months, WNYC and Gothamist have been celebrating this milestone by spotlighting women who've made their own distinct mark on the culture. Kathleen Adams co-founded Momma's Hip Hop Kitchen.

The transcript of Kathleen Adams's story has been lightly edited for clarity

My name is Kathleen Adams, and I'm one of the co-founders of Momma's Hip Hop Kitchen. The mission of Momma's Hip Hop Kitchen is to change the way that people view women, especially women of color in hip-hop, through song and dance, graffiti, b-girls, DJs, graffiti artists, things like that, and we've been around since 2008.

Momma's Hip Hop Kitchen has been inspired by a couple different things. The first part was I was a student at Fordham University, which is in the Bronx, and hip-hop was created in the South Bronx. My co-founder and myself were really passionate about hip-hop, as well as environmental factors that impact communities of color, specifically in the South Bronx.

At that time, the South Bronx was the poorest congressional district in the United States and also had one of the highest rates of HIV in the nation. I've always been passionate about reproductive justice, the right to be a parent, the right to not be a parent, and the right to parent your child, which is more of a holistic view of the pro-choice movement. So, we wanted to be able to use all these public health, social justice issues to spur a conversation. We knew that hip-hop was a great platform and a vehicle of change when it was started, so we wanted to reclaim hip-hop specifically for women. We felt that women were not getting the shine that they deserved but were also being over sexualized at the time. So, it's all these things that were kind of bubbling up. We decided to create Momma's Hip Hop Kitchen, the soup kitchen for the hip-hop soul. And so, the reason why we call it that is because women congregate in the kitchen to talk about issues and ideas, and hip-hop is the same thing.

I was introduced to hip-hop at a young age. My father is actually from Brooklyn. However, I grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, so not the playground of hip-hop at all. However, Cleveland is very much a music town. So, we had a lot of music in our household. I feel like I always heard my dad listening to hip-hop, so it just grew from there. I couldn't be who I am without hip-hop. Let's put it that way.