(New Market, TN) -  The Highlander Research and Education Center is pleased to introduce the members of the inaugural class of Greensboro Justice Fund Fellows at Highlander.  Highlander is honored to have been chosen, along with the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, NC, to carry on the social and economic justice legacy of the Greensboro Justice Fund (GJF).

	Teumbay (Tee) Barnes is currently Outreach Organizer at FOCAL (Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama). Tee believes that creating change begins within. Her passion is being involved in movements that help alter negative images that destroy communities. She helps create safe and sacred spaces where people are free to advocate for policy change.  In her leisure, she enjoys yard sales, reading fiction, traveling, and experimenting in the kitchen.  She has also served as an Adjunct Instructor at Trenholm State Technical College.
	Darrell Bouldin is a lifelong Tennessean who was raised in a village of less than 200.  He dreams of building a better world free of war, poverty, and racism – such as the global Beloved Community.  Darrell is the founder of the Coffee Party Progressives, as well as a group of grassroots activists in his city.  He serves on the board of the TN Alliance for Progress , the steering committee for the Emerging  Changemakers Network, and is a member of the core management team of WorldShift Movement, an alumnus of the Rockwood Leadership Institute, and a 2010 graduate of the New Organizing Institute’s New Media BootCamp.
	Ahmané Glover is from Savannah, Ga. She graduated from Loyola University New Orleans with a B.A. in Communications and Spanish. She has lived in New Orleans for almost seven years and has done work and continues to work for HIV/AIDS prevention, education/mentorship programs, violence prevention, economic justice, disaster rebuilding, and community healing through the arts to name a few. Her recent peace building work includes: the Peace by Piece Nonviolence Youth Group, an annual Peace is Power Giant Puppet Parade, and a Peace Recycled Art Curriculum for youth (among other things).
	Marcus Hill – Social justice has been a personal focus for as long as Marcus can remember, but he only began thinking about structural solutions during his time at Wake Forest after meeting Cornel West. Marcus interned as a community organizer before moving on to graduate school, and also took part in the Z Media Institute (a progressive political think tank and bi-annual school hosted by the publishers of ZNet/Z Magazine). Marcus has since moved back to Winston-Salem, NC, and is working on projects aimed at increasing community access and participation.
	Maria Quezada was born and raised on the South Side of San Antonio, Texas. As the oldest of three children, she was the first in her family to attend college. While a student of the University of Texas at San Antonio, she received her Bachelor’s Degree in Mexican American Studies and a Master of Arts in Bilingual Cultural Studies (with a concentration in Urban Studies).  Maria continues to help build bridges between higher education and her community because she feels that education is the best way to overcome poverty and fight for equality.

 

For thirty years, the Greensboro Justice Fund worked to increase capacity of the progressive movement by supporting over 300 cutting-edge, community based organizations working to end all forms of discrimination and exploitation.  The Fund was established to honor and carry on the work of César Cauce, Mike Nathan, Bill Sampson, Sandy Smith and Jim Waller, five community organizers who were murdered in Greensboro, NC on November 3, 1070 by the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis.

Believing in the power of and strategic need for committed and skilled organizers, the GJF at its 30^th anniversary announced the donation of its assets to the Beloved Community Center and to Highlander to train organizers in the name of the Greensboro Justice Fund. The Fund was originally created using an award from a civil case that found the city of Greensboro and members of the Ku Klux Klan complicit in the murders.

Greensboro Justice Fund Fellows at Highlander began their year-long fellowship focused on learning, thinking and acting by attending a popular education and community organizing social change workshop at the Highlander Center, during which time fellows worked together as a class as well as part of a larger learning circle of people from around the country. Throughout the year, fellows will have access to mentoring, be networked to each other through technologies, attend a second training at the Highlander Center and be supported in other learning opportunities regionally and nationally to enhance their skills and build relationships.

The Highlander Center serves as a catalyst for grassroots organizing in the South and Appalachia and approaches its 80s anniversary as a world renowned beacon for progressive organizing.

www.highlandercenter.org

Where did you grow up?

TGB: I was born in Hamblen County Hospital. I grew up in my mother’s home, which was in Halls Cross Roads, and visited my father quite often in Jefferson City.

I consider myself to have grown up in The Hills of Tennessee.

How did you come into playing music?

TGB: I have been singing since childhood. My father taught me a little on guitar when I was young but it was never pushed and I was never given an instrument or put into lessons. I always knew I loved music and loved to sing but it wasn’t until after I earned my Master of Fine Arts degree that I got “hooked” on music.

After that moment there was nothing else that appeased that craving.

It only took a couple of years and here I am… I don’t know how I lived without it for so long!

How would you describe your music?

TGB: The majority of folks would call it Americana. I would call it Appalachian roots music. I am drawn to the music of our mountains and the people that survived in them long enough to hand it down to us.

It is a true melting pot of cultures, peoples, music, and traditions.

That is what I try to encompass when I go to making music!

What sort of impact do you hope that your music has on people? On the world?

TGB: I hope that it helps to broaden the ideas and minds of the listener as well as bring them right back home to where it all comes from.

I want to relate to their upbringing and help them remember that we are stewards of our own culture and without that it can all be lost. We must nurture and instill culture within our society and our youth.

Music can so all of this! It is very powerful.

Why were you interested in doing this benefit concert for Highlander?

TGB: The Highlander Center stands for much of what I stand for when it comes to my music. They help to empower and instill cultural diversity and understanding within our society and our youth to bring about more sensitive and intelligent generations. They set out to raise the stewards of our world to have the best possible skill sets and moral structures to take on the future.

I am so happy to help with their goals and future endeavors!

Remarks from the 2011 Circle of Change Awards
The “Gardener of Change” award is presented to an educator who works to create fertile ground for social change through reflection & teaching. Mónica Hernandez is the best kind of educator – the kind where you never feel she’s teaching you – but you always leave more educated. A proponent of the “popular education model,” Mónica says, “I believe that popular education starts from personal experience and builds a deliberate intentionality … to help people look at the conditions and issues they are dealing with and make things better.” She first learned about popular education while doing HIV prevention work in San Francisco. She says “I became convinced that movements need to be led by the people most affected. Not to just go in and say, “This is what you’re going to do,” [but] to start from where people are and honor their experiences. Immigrants and poor people in general are always being told that their knowledge and experiences don’t matter. Folks have a lot of self-esteem issues because the education system has failed them, and they believe it’s their fault – they think they’re stupid and dumb and ignorant. Popular education has the potential to strengthen their self-esteem around their own life experiences.”

A native of Mexico with roots in both countries, Mónica came to [Tennessee] to work with the Highlander Center after working at the Northern California Coalition for Immigration Rights for 13 years. She was a key developer of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition and was the organization’s founding Board Chair. To me, Mónica epitomizes the saying “still waters run deep.” She is quiet and unassuming, but she also has a great sense of humor and a tireless commitment to change and to education. In her own words “I believe that the only way change is going to happen is from the bottom up. Popular education is a key part of that process.” Mónica Hernandez is also a key part of the process, and that’s why she’s our 2011 Gardener of Change.

Shelley Wascom, Executive Director- Community Shares

REMARKS

Thank you, Shelley. Thank you, Community Shares for this honor and a very special thank you to Fran Ansley for nominating me. And, thank you to my families: my Hernández Weissner family, my Highlander family, my TIRRC family, and my chosen family of friends and loved ones, all who have taught me the intrinsic—and intricate—connection between love, dignity and justice.

I first came to East Tennessee 9 years ago to work at Highlander. I had no experience with the US South, and other than a very general understanding that this region’s history of racism, oppression, and resistance made it critical, I knew little else. On my drive cross country from California, my first official event as Highlander staff was an immigrant rights conference in Nashville, where I learned, much to my surprise, that immigrant rights activists here had succeeded in restoring the right for all immigrants regardless of status to obtain a driver’s license, something we had fought for unsuccessfully in California for 4 years. That was just the beginning of what has become almost a decade of learning and growing from a community that I am proud to call home, a community that— while it may not have the most or the best resourced organizations—is fierce and unrelenting in its work for social justice, and against indignity, injustice and oppression.

It is important to take pause, to celebrate, to honor our social justice community. But I don’t need to tell you that there is a great deal to do:

Next week, for example, the Tennessee legislature is threatening to require the public school system to collect and report data, such as social security, visa and passport numbers from all students enrolling, effectively discouraging many immigrant families of mixed or undocumented status from participating in the public education system.

This, and many more issues, requires our attention, our energy, our commitment. But there is something to me that is even scarier than all the threats and the attacks that we are facing from the reactionary forces of this country, and that is the state of our Movement and our organizations. As we all know, social justice organizations, especially grassroots groups, have taken enormous hits during this economic crisis. The Right has also used various despicable tactics to undermine the work that we do, targeting a range of organizations, whether it’s ACORN or Planned Parenthood. But perhaps an even bigger threat comes from the inside, and that threat is our failure to look critically at how we do our work, to be in a continued reflective dialogue between theory and practice, to use methodology such as popular education not only as a tool to organize our constituents, but as a critical component of our own internal processes. This disconnect weakens us and makes us extremely vulnerable and it diminishes our impact to create the world we envision. So, when we all go back to our work on Monday, I implore us to ASK OURSELVES QUESTIONS LIKE THESE:

WHAT ROLE DOES REFLECTION/STUDY PLAY IN OUR WORK? HOW DO WE ENGAGE IN A CONTINUOUS PRACTICE OF ACTION-REFLECTION-ACTION TO HELP STRENGTHEN AND INFORM OUR ORGANIZING WORK?

HOW DO WE MOVE OUR WORK FROM FOCUSING ON SINGLE ISSUES OR CONSTITUENCIES AND LIFT UP THE INTERSECTIONS, THE PRINCIPLES, THE VALUES, THE ELEMENTS OF OUR VISION OF JUSTICE?

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THOSE MOST IMPACTED BY THE ISSUES WE ARE WORKING ON IN OUR MOVEMENT, AND IN OUR ORGANIZATIONS? WHAT ROLE DO I MYSELF PLAY IN HELPING OR HINDERING THE LEADERSHIP OF THOSE MOST AFFECTED?

HOW DO WE, AS ORGANIZATIONS, LIVE THE VALUES AND THE PRINCIPLES THAT ENCOMPASS OUR VISION FOR A JUST WORLD?

There are many other questions we could ask ourselves, but these are foremost in my mind lately.

Paolo Freire said, “The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.” I believe this to be true not only about individuals, but of organizations, of movements, as well. Let’s continue to strengthen Knoxville, East Tennessee, and the South into the transformative communities we all envision. Thank you.

Mónica Hernández, April 16, 2011

The Highlander Research and Education Center is pleased to announce a new leadership program, the Greensboro Justice Fund Fellowship at Highlander. Highlander was chosen, along with the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, NC, to carry on the social and economic justice legacy of the Greensboro Justice Fund (GJF) and is honored to do so.

For 30 years, GJF worked to increase the capacity of the progressive movement by supporting over 300 cutting-edge, community based organizations working for political empowerment, workers rights, environmental justice and an end to all forms of discrimination and exploitation.

The Fund was established to honor and carry on the work of César Cauce, Mike Nathan, Bill Sampson, Sandy Smith, and Jim Waller, five community organizers who were murdered in Greensboro by the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis on November 3, 1979.

	César Cauce was a Cuban immigrant who graduated magna cum laude from Duke University. He was a leader in the long struggle for a union for Duke Hospital Workers and organized community support for Durham chicken plant workers on strike against intolerable working conditions and low wages.
	Dr. Mike Nathan had been an anti-war and civil rights student activist at Duke University and had become a “people’s physician” as chief pediatrician at Lincoln Community Health Center in Durham, NC. He was a leader in a movement to send aid to liberation fighters in then-apartheid Zimbabwe and protested maltreatment of hospital workers at Durham County General Hospital.
	William Sampson was a student anti-war activist and president of his college student body. He studied theology at Harvard Divinity School and then medicine at the University of Virginia. However, he left medicine to work and organize in a Greensboro Cone textile mill where he built the union and was a shoo-in for president of the local.
	Sandra Smith was President of the student body at Greensboro’s Bennett College and an activist on behalf of African-American students. As leader of a union organizing drive at a Greensboro Cone Mill textile plant, she battled sexual harassment, low wages and unhealthy working conditions.
	Dr. James Michael Waller had for many years lent his expertise in medicine to poor people in need. He had trained at the Lincoln Hospital Collective in New York City, had flown to Wounded Knee to aid American Indian Movement activists under siege from the FBI, and had organized Black lung screenings in North Carolina textile mills. He left medicine to work and organize in a rural Cone Mills textile plant where he had led a successful strike and had been elected president of this union.

Applications/Nominations Sought

Believing in the power of and strategic need for committed and skilled organizers, the GJF at its 30^th anniversary announced the donation of its assets to the Beloved Community Center and to Highlander to train organizers in the name of the Greensboro Justice Fund, which was created using an award from a civil case that found the city of Greensboro and members of the Ku Klux Klan complicit in the murders.

This year will be the first class of the Greensboro Justice Fund Fellows at Highlander and we seek applications/nominations. There will be five fellows per class in honor of the five organizers who were killed.  Applications are due April 11.

Activities and Benefits of the Fellowship

Fellows will begin their one-year fellowship by attending a popular education and community organizing social change workshop at Highlander May 31 – June 4, 2011.  They will attend the workshop as part of a larger group with other people. During those dates, fellows  will also have small group time as a class, and individual time as well. A second training opportunity will be scheduled during the year. Throughout the year, fellows will be networked to each other through conference calls and internet technologies as well assisted in other opportunities regionally and nationally to enhance their skills and build relationships. They will be supported by Highlander staff and representatives of the Greensboro Justice Fund. Expenses to Highlander workshops will be covered by the fellowship, and fellows will receive a $500 stipend to support their local community efforts.

Eligibility Requirements

Fellows must be living and working for social justice primarily in the  states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. One fellow each year will be from North Carolina. Applicants must be 18 years of age or older.

Applicants must be available for the first activities of the Fellowship at the Highlander Center, May 31 – Jun 4, 2011.

To apply for the Greensboro Justice Fund Fellowship at Highlander

Fellows should submit a Statement of Interest and Intent with the support of 3 nominators who write a one page nomination/reference letter.

Statement of Interest and Intent

In your own way and your own words, please let the selection committee know the following about you:

1)      Your name, postal address, phone number(s) and email address.

2)      Please describe your work for justice and community organizing experience.

3)      Discuss the skills you would like to strengthen or develop and/or the things you would like to learn as a GJF Fellow at Highlander.

4)      Describe how the fellowship could help you move forward as a community organizer.

5)      What is your vision for how change happens?

6)      What would be exciting to you about being a Greensboro Justice Fund Fellow at the Highlander Center?

7)      What might you find challenging about being a Greensboro Justice Fund Fellow at the Highlander Center?

8)      Please tell us about any additional information not yet mentioned including your paid work experience, volunteer experience or any awards or recognitions you have received. (submission of current resume may suffice)

Application/Nomination Process

Applications must be received in the Highlander Office by 8:00 pm eastern time, Monday, April 11, 2011. Only complete applications will be considered. A complete application includes the following:

• A Statement of Interest and Intent (please see questions above)
• 3 Nominator Reference Statements (Reference statements can be sent separately as long as they meet the deadline.)

Applications will be received any one of the following ways:

Mailed to Greensboro Justice Fund Fellowships at the Highlander Center

1959 Highlander Way, New Market, TN 37820

Faxed to – 865-933-3424

E-mailed to – hrec@highlandercenter.org

Selection Process and Timeline

A small committee of representatives of the Highlander Center and Greensboro Justice Fund will select the five fellows. Phone interviews will be conducted with the finalists.

Timeline:

April 11                   Applications due

May 6                     Notification of Fellows

May 31 – Jun 5          Attendance at Highlander

To Be Scheduled       2^nd Workshop at Highlander

Excerpt from Comments of Highlander Director Pam McMichael at the

Greensboro Justice Fund 30^th Anniversary Event

“Highlander is honored to be given this opportunity to carry on the legacy and work of the Greensboro Justice Fund, and honored to be carrying forward that work with the Beloved Community Center. We would like to express our deep appreciation and respect to the survivors, families and members of the community, and of the Fund for your vision, history, courage and work for these 30 years.

We look forward to working with many of you and the Beloved Community Center to help build organizing skills for racial and economic justice in the name of Sandy Smith, César Cauce, Michael Nathan, Bill Sampson and Jim Waller.  Their names, their work, what happened here 30 years ago, and the story of this community and the Fund, should be familiar to all who work for justice in the South and across the country.

At Highlander, those of us who are the current board and staff step into a 77 year history that was created by thousands and thousands of people, many whose names are known to us, most whose names are unknown. It is always humbling, and sometimes daunting, and we believe the best way to honor that history is to learn from it so that we may be the most effective social justice actors that we can for the challenges facing all of us today.

This is the spirit we carry into Greensboro Justice Fund Fellowships at the Highlander Center.”

Wild & Wacky, Witty & Wonderful Workshop Work Week—Take 3!

May 31—June 4, 2011
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Third Wild and Wacky, Witty and Wonderful Workshop Work Week – otherwise known as W-7.3

Come to the mountains of east Tennessee and spend one of the best starts to your summer ever with Highlander staff and people from around the country at W-7.3.

MORNINGS: Spend the awakening sunlight hours in those renowned rocking chairs building on the idea of Highlander – workshops on popular education, social justice organizing, movement building, and the history of social change & what all that can mean in your organizing and community work today.

AFTERNOONS: Spend the afternoon hours of sunshine in service to the place of Highlander. As part of a team – and in a praxis that continues learning from each other through dialogue and educational exchange – prune in the orchard, cultivate in the garden, clear a hiking trail, plant trees ‘on the hill’, build a bench, or file in the office, for example. There will be volunteer jobs for all levels of skill and ability.
The cost for this 2-day workshop is $350-500 and includes room and board. Some scholarships are available for people with limited means who are actively engaged in social change (please send scholarship application with your registration!)  Childcare and English/Spanish translation can be provided upon request.

Download an application here.

For more information, contact:  Kristi Coleman (Coleman@highlandercenter.org) 865-933-3443 ext.221, or email hrec@highlandercenter.org

You can send the application on-line or mail it with a check to:  Kristi Coleman, Highlander Center, 1959 Highlander Way, New Market, TN 37820, Fax number is 865-933-3424.  We can take payment by check or credit card.