The Beloved Communities Initiative
Steering Committee
Grace Lee Boggs
Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer and
speaker whose sixty years of political involvement encompass the major U.S.
social movements of
the
20th century: Labor, Civil rights, Black Power, Asian American, Women's,
anti-war, Education for Democracy, and Environmental Justice. Currently she is
active in DETROIT SUMMER,
a multicultural, intergenerational youth program/movement to rebuild, redefine
and re-spirit Detroit from the ground up. She writes a column in the weekly
Michigan Citizen. Her autobiography,
Living for Change,
(University of Minnesota Press, 1998) is widely used in university classes on
social movements, the history of Detroit, and Asian American Studies.
See and hear Grace Lee Boggs, (91 years young) bring a message of hope during troubling times with a new paradigm of leadership and activism. Grace Lee Boggs was recently interviewed by Bill Moyers. Click here for more information on Grace Lee Boggs provided by Bill Moyers Journal.
Shea Howell
A community activist, Shea Howell is a
Co-founder of DETROIT SUMMER,
a multicultural, intergenerational youth leadership program that
engages the talents and energies of young people in rebuilding and redefining
the city from the ground up. Howell writes a weekly column for the Michigan
Citizen and is chair of the Department of Rhetoric, Communication & Journalism
at Oakland University. Howell has worked on numerous community and cultural
issues in Detroit and around the country.
Nelson Johnson
Active in the movement for social and
economic justice since the late 1950s, the Reverend Nelson Johnson continues
this work as executive director of the
Beloved Community Center of
Greensboro and pastor of Faith Community Church. Johnson centers his efforts
on facilitating a
process
of comprehensive community building, which includes the convergence of racial
and ethnic diversity, social and economic justice, and genuine participatory
democracy. At the Beloved Community Center he and his colleagues attempt to
bring together the homeless, the imprisoned, members from impoverished
neighborhoods and other disenfranchised groups in a spirit of mutual support and
community.
John D. Maguire
After 28 years as a university president, the final 17 at Claremont Graduate University, John D. Maguire became senior fellow at the Institute for Democratic Renewal in the University’s School of Politics and Economics. President Emeritus Maguire is a consultant to the Oakland-based Project Change, with which the Institute entered into partnership in 2002. He is engaged fulltime in a range of antiracism, democratic community building projects and activities. A colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he is a life director of the King Center and served in its initial year (1968-69) as chair of the board.
Kathy Sanchez
Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez, MA, San IIdefonso
Pueblo (Tewa), from New Mexico, is an educator, potter and co-director of
Tewa Women United,
an
organization comprised of Indigenous women advocating for positive social
changes.
Shirley Strong
Shirley Strong has worked in higher education, philanthropy and social justice for nearly 30 years, the last twelve of which have been with the Levi Strauss Foundation and the Tides Center. Currently, she is Executive Director for Project Change, a national initiative that works with multi-racial coalitions, partnerships and alliances in developing locally based anti-racist community building programs.
Rachel Harding (Consulting Writer)
Rachel E. Harding is a historian, writer and
consultant specializing in religious traditions of the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora
and the intersections of
faith,
culture and activism in contemporary social justice movements. She is
executive director of
the Veterans of Hope Project at
Iliff School of Theology in Denver, CO. The author of a book on Afro-Brazilian
religion, she is currently preparing a manuscript on southern mysticism and the
role of compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation in social justice
activism. The manuscript is based on her mother’s unfinished memoir.
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