Cocoa Brown is an actress, writer and comedian who is best known as Jennifer in Tyler Perry’s “For Better or Worse” and her role as Lytia in The Single Moms Club. In addition to her career in the film industry, she started a nonprofit charity called Wigs of Love Lupus Foundation to support women losing their hair to the autoimmune disease.
Brown opened up about what it means to her personally and how the community can support.
What inspired you to start the Wigs of Love Lupus Foundation?
Wigs of Love started because I knew a lot of women who lost their hair with lupus, and because my girlfriend Vanessa, God rest her soul, lost her battle with brain cancer. She eventually embraced her bald head but for the longest I was throwing her wigs. I was sending her wigs because she was so self-conscious about her hair falling out during her cancer battle. When her daughter sent me back all those wigs when she passed, I said, “I’ve got to do something with these wigs.” I said, “Well, why not give these to women who’ve lost their hair because there are a lot of us who still believe our hair is our crown and glory, and it defines us.” That’s just who we are as Black women, whether it’s a bald head or weave down to our feet, it’s something about when we put on that hair or no hair that is a symbol of our strength of who we are. So, you know what I did for them — and this [is] my second time doing it — I gave them a Hollywood weekend. They’re picked up in a limo, they’re taken to a secret location, and they are given a full Hollywood glam makeover with professional makeup and a custom-made wig. We also gifted them a portrait of themselves, basically to say, “You are beautiful, you are not lupus, you’re bigger than that.” It was a great event and it was all about them.
How can the community support you?
We’re doing things year-round. … You can go to wigsoflove.org, and you can check out what we do, what we’ve done in the past, what we’re going to do, and you can donate. It’s very simple if you have Cashapp, it’s $WigsofLove, and you can also mail a check, the address is on there. We appreciate everything, it’s a 501c3 nonprofit organization and all the money that comes in goes to these women and goes to the cause. I don’t pocket a dime, OK? I need you to know that, OK? Cocoa Brown is good, she tells jokes. This goes to the next event that we’ll be doing. We’ll be doing something for Thanksgiving where we [will] choose two families who [have someone] in the family [who is battling] lupus and we [will] provide them with their Thanksgiving dinner. We [will] take them to the grocery store at Walmart or wherever, give them a gift card, and say, “now get what you need for dinner.” Then at Christmas, we also do a toy drive. We give toys to families who are battling lupus, so we need your help to make that happen.
