Dear Friends:
We are off to a fantastic start this year. Community Healing Network led its first-ever city-wide community healing summit from January 26 through January 29, 2012. And what a wonderful, history-making weekend it was.
The Summit was an outgrowth of a partnership with Mayor Omar Neal of the City of Tuskegee, Alabama, Tuskegee University, the Association of Black Psychologists, and Symphonic Strategies, Inc. We came together because of our shared belief that many of the problems facing the Black community in Tuskegee--and around the nation and the world--are rooted in the lie of Black inferiority, and that in order to reverse the negative trends in the Black community, we must, as a people, engage in the struggle for what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called "psychological freedom."
The Tuskegee Community Healing Summit brought together a diverse group of municipal, religious, educational, and other civic leaders to share their views on the challenges facingTuskegee, their hopes for the future, and the role of emotional healing in paving the way to a brighter day for the City. Our goal was to emerge on Sunday, January 29, with detailed outlines for a curriculum and a training manual to equip local leaders to establish and sustain emotional emancipation (EE) circles--self-help groups focused on emotional emancipation, healing, and wellness for Black people.
We are delighted to report that the Summit met--and exceeded--our goal. We made great progress in establishing an infrastructure for a city-wide movement for emotional emancipation in Tuskegee, and we developed a detailed outline for an Emotional Emancipation Circles Toolkit.
A team of nine talented psychologists under the stellar leadership of Dr. Cheryl Grills, president of the Association of Black Psychologists, helped us develop the outline, and have kept up the momentum--making history all through this Black History Month--diligently expanding and refining the Toolkit.
This ground-breaking Toolkit, designed to make it easy for any group of interested Black people to launch and sustain an Emotional Emancipation (EE) Circle, will provide a resource to help spark the creation of EE Circles in families and neighborhoods across the country and around the world. This work brings us an important step closer to our goal of engaging a critical mass of Black people in a grassroots movement for personal, family and community emancipation and healing by the year 2019--so that we will see ourselves in a whole new light by the year 2020.
We are deeply grateful to the wonderful people who made the Tuskegee Community Healing Summit possible: to Mayor Omar Neal, for his inspiring leadership; to the great people of Tuskegee, for their warm southern hospitality and for taking the time to participate in the Summit; to our sponsors, Stephanie Robinson and the Jamestown Project, Bill Winston Ministries, the Utilities Board of Tuskegee, and Tiger Pause, for their generous financial support; to the members of ABPsi, Dr. Cheryl Grills, Dr. Daryl Rowe, Dr. Craig Bookins, Dr. Chante DeLoach, Dr. Huberta Jackson-Lowman, Dr. Linda James Myers, Dr. Eve Northrup, Dr. Ciara Smalls, and Dr. Roderick Watts, whose level of expertise, professionalism, goodwill, hard work, and commitment to helping CHN realize its vision is simply breathtaking; and to Dr. Alonford J. Robinson of Symphonic Strategies, Inc., for his wise counsel and excellent meeting facilitation skills.
This outpouring of support is proof positive, that as a people, we have everything we need to finish our journey toward complete freedom--freedom not only in body, but also in mind and in spirit. We will have a more detailed report on the Summit and the Toolkit for you soon. Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to our next steps with you on the journey toward emancipation and healing.
Thanks,
Enola Aird, Jill Snyder, Dottie Green, Carl Miller, Natalie Roche, Tarice Gray, Wizdom Powell Hammond, Sheila Warren, Ric Jennings, Gretchen Vaughn, and all your friends at Community Healing Network, Inc.,
www.communityhealingnet.org
P.S. Please help us make this the decade for the emotional emancipation of Black people. CHN is a low-overhead, volunteer-run, 501(c) (3) grassroots organization. We are supported entirely by charitable donations. Your gift of any amount will help. Please donate today using the secure link below, or send a check to Community Healing Network, Inc., 111 Whalley Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511, Attention: Jill Snyder, Treasurer. Thanks again.
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