Since September 2015, Speaking Down Barriers and the Project for Community Transformation have partnered to build deep community for healing and justice.

What we have accomplished so far:

Speaking Down Barriers

Speaking Down Barriers transforms our life together across our differences by facilitating community dialogue, training, performances, and consultation.  Our vision is of a world where all people are confronting and healing the wounds of difference, including race, gender, class, religion, national identity, and sexual orientation.  Rather than our differences be a source of division, they are a source of our collective strength.

• More than 100 community dialogues and trainings held across North and South Carolina since November 2013.
• Quintupled programming, quadrupled budget in one year.
• Team growth from 1, to 2, to 8 facilitators.
• Worked on nine college campuses in NC and SC in 2016.
• Developed a base of five monthly programs across the SC Upstate:
  • Community Gatherings, a monthly facilitated dialogue open to everyone to discuss our history, our society, our identities, and how to build our future, averaging 60-100 people/gathering.
  • Healing Us, a monthly gathering of people of African descent, to work together for healing and empowerment;
  • Learning Us, a monthly gathering of people of European descent, to confront together the legacy of privilege and oppression that we have inherited, and that it is our responsibility to help transform;
  • Reading for Transformation, a monthly study group reading challenging books on community building and transformative action; and
  • no words, a monthly gathering in which music, meditation, and creativity provide a space for all people to heal and restore without the interfering constructs of words and ideas.
• Consult nationally with communities in Michigan, Oregon, and Texas who want to engage the work of deep community building.
• Recognition:
  • 2017 Woman of Accomplishment for Spartanburg and for South Carolina, Business and Professional Women of South Carolina, April 2017 (awarded to Marlanda Dekine)
  • Diversity Leadership Initiative Non-Profit Award, from the Riley Institute at Furman University, May 2017
  • National Endowment for the Humanities grant through the SC Humanities Council, August 2016-May 2017
  • Atlantic Institute Peace & Dialogue Award, April 2016
  • Mary L. Thomas Award for Civic Leadership and Community Change, from the Spartanburg County Foundation (awarded to Speaking Down Barriers & the Project for Community Transformation as joint recipients), February 2016
  • Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award for Service to Humanity, Wofford College, May 2015 (awarded to Scott Neely)
  • TEDx Greenville talks on racism (April 2015) and the transformative power of spoken word (April 2016)

The Project for Community Transformation

The Project for Community Transformation helps individuals, organizations, and congregations energize and thrive, for the purpose of serving their communities more effectively.

• Five congregations (one large urban church; three small, semi-rural churches; and one mid-size urban synagogue) and four non-profit organizations have partnered with the Project to develop their work.
• For those congregations and organizations more than six months into their process, within the first year of partnership each:
  • made personnel adjustments that empowered both professional and congregational leadership.
  • stabilized financially and are now building reserves. 
  • added new members or constituents. One congregation grew by more than 20%. One organization quadrupled its outreach.
  • developed new relationship-based, community-focused programs. Seven new local missions have been developed between the congregations.
• Provided 31 pastors and non-profit leaders extended one-on-one vocational discernment and workplace counsel, to access their deepest gifts. Sessions focus on giftedness, vocation, workplace conflicts, and strategic growth. In the case of more than twenty pastoral leaders, all continued and expanded in their current ministry settings. 

In partnership

• Trained a group of nine clergy from Greenville, SC to work better together across differences of denomination, religion, and race, in order to serve their community more effectively. The first phase of trainings took place over a six-month period during the spring and summer of 2016. The group then requested a second phase of training, for the winter and spring of 2017. They now form a cross-denominational, interreligious clergy leadership team engaging some of Greenville’s most difficult community issues, such as this and this.
• More than $18,500 in grants and start-up funding for five grassroots initiatives addressing poverty and economic empowerment, in communities across South Carolina
• Creation of media label, {unnamed}. Publication of first book, i am from a punch & a kiss. More than 250 copies sold in the first two months; required reading at four colleges and universities in the fall of 2017. Five more books in production.

What matters most

What matters most in this work cannot be quantified: the transformation of individual lives, of teams and communities, to work more deeply from who we most are, for a world in which every person can thrive. We have seen this happen; we are grateful.

Forward

The Project for Community Transformation will now integrate into a larger model of transformation developed through this partnership, with Speaking Down Barriers in the lead organizational role.

To fuel our work, connect with us here.