Highlander’s Seeds of Fire Youth Leadership Camp will be held on July 20-26, 2008. The camp is for southern youth age 13-19 involved in local organizing efforts, and their adult allies.
For more information and to apply online, click here.
The next deadline for applications to the We Shall Overcome Fund is June 1, 2008.
The We Shall Overcome Fund supports projects in the South that use arts, culture and community activism to organize for social, economic, and political justice to the benefit of African American communities. The fund is supported by the commercial royalties from the song “We Shall Overcome” and is administered by Highlander.
For more information about the We Shall Overcome Fund and how to apply, click here.
For an excellent introduction to youth organizing, check out Resist’s March-April 2008 newsletter, “Youth Organizing Today.”
Articles include “Youth Building Movements for Change,” “Youth Fight Displacement — and Win!,” “Building the Future by Shaping the Present: Why Youth Organizing Is Critical for Positive Social Change,” and “Youth Activism Victories in 2007.”
The issue also features a list of resources for youth organizing that includes Highlander’s own Seeds of Fire Youth Leadership Training Program, as well as the Center for Third World Organizing, Project Hip-Hop, the School of Unity and Liberation, and Student Action for Farmworkers.
Resist has been supporting organizing and education for social change for over 40 years. You can learn more about their work www.resistinc.org.
[5/6/08 - added image of newsletter.]
On April 2, 2008, three former members of the Black Panther Party — David Hilliard, Fredricka Newton, and James Calhoun — visited Highlander for a dialogue on civil rights lessons from the past for the present and the future. Over 50 friends, colleagues, and members of the Highlander staff attended the gathering.
To see pictures from the Black Panthers’ visit to Highlander, click here. A more detailed report will be posted soon.
On February 15-17, 2008, thirty-three young activists and organizers ranging in age from 18 to 34 came to Highlander for Transitions: A Young Adult Leadership Gathering, which focused on leadership transition issues in Appalachia and the South. Participants explored the question of transition on three related levels:
Transitions also provided an important opportunity for participants to network with other activists in the region. The gathering was racially and geographically diverse and included people with a wide range of experience and very different positions in their organizations. Still, participants found that they faced many of the same problems and that their work overlapped in significant ways - particularly around issues such as education, the criminalization of youth, and environmental justice.
Transitions was the first in what will be a series of local and regional gatherings to support young adults involved in social change in the region. Highlander will hold a second gathering for young adult activists in the fall, and staff members are currently documenting the Transitions curriculum for use in other gatherings on transition issues. Participants are also getting together locally and setting up a “circle” on the Building Leadership/Organizing Communities website (www.mybloc.net) so they can continue supporting each other and sharing ideas and strategies.
The National Organizers Alliance Gathering VI will be held June 29-July 2 at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Community and labor organizers from many spectrums of the movement around the country will come together in the NOA tradition of sharing and learning, strategizing and building community. We will be looking back through decades of movement building for justice, learning from present organizing experiences and looking ahead to the future.
Space is limited. Information available on scholarships. Go to www.noacentral.org or email Gathering6@noacentral.org or phone 202-543-6603 x 204.
On April 3rd, Tavis Smiley interviewed Dorothy Cotton, a long-time friend and colleague of Highlander and former Education Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), where she worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the interview, Ms. Cotton emphasized the importance of the SCLC’s citizenship education program, which began at Highlander in 1954 and which was transferred to SCLC in 1961 when Highlander was under attack for its work with the civil rights movement.
In Ms. Cotton’s view, the citizenship education program was “the best program SCLC had.” Its participants, she said, were “ordinary people right off the farms and the plantations,” and after their training they “went back to their home towns, and those home towns were never the same again.”
Ms. Cotton also discussed how she got involved in the civil rights movement, the sexism in the movement, and more.
You can listen to the interview, read a transcript, and watch a short video clip at http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200804/20080403_cotton.html.
“Bilingual Resource From Highlander’s Bookstore” featured in The Popular Education News (No. 57; April 2008).
The article highlights Across Races and Nations: Building New Communities In The U.S. South / A traves de Razas y Naciones: Construyendo Communidades en el Nuevo Sur de EEUU - a bilingual report on the impact of immigration and the opportunities for cross-race organizing in the region. The report was the result of a participatory research project sponsored by Highlander, the Southern Regional Council, and the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis. It includes articles and stories on organizing, workshop materials, and an extensive bibliography.
To order Across Races and Nations or other materials from the Highlander bookstore, visit www.highlandercenter.org/r-bookstore.asp.
On March 7-8, 2008, Highlander staff members Mónica Hernández and Elandria Williams facilitated workshops at El Foro Latino and Foro Juvenil, the annual statewide immigrant leadership gatherings for adults and young people in North Carolina sponsored by El Pueblo.
The two gatherings were held at the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly in Black Mountain, NC, and attended by nearly 300 immigrants from across the state. Both were very diverse — attended by documented, undocumented, and migrant activists from urban and rural areas whose countries of origin included Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Peru, and more.
Mónica led a workshop at El Foro Latino on leadership and base building for social change that was attended by 40 people. This session explored how different styles of leadership enhance or hinder social change, and it helped participants identify concrete steps to strengthen leadership development in their own organizations and communities.
Elandria led two workshops At Foro Juvenil on youth activism and young people’s role in social change attended by a total of 125 people. These sessions used popular theater and other techniques to help participants identify the forces and institutions that hold young people down and how they can “flip the script.”
The youth workshops also highlighted the ongoing impact of Highlander’s education work. The planning committee for El Foro Juvenil included two youth and two adult allies from El Pueblo who attended Highlander’s 2007 Seeds of Fire youth leadership camp, and Elandria was assisted by two young people from El Centro Hispano who also attended the 2007 camp.
Please join us at Highlander on April 12th from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. to help prepare our gardens for the spring.
Members of the Good Karma Gardening Circle and other friends of Highlander will be here, working on the gardens at the office, the Horton House, and possibly the library.
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We will have lunch at the Workshop Center with participants in a Singing and Song-Sharing Workshop that will be going on that weekend.
For more information, click here.
