News of Our Work: Here’s a Two-Year Update!!

Dear Friends,

It has been quite some time since Gloria and I were in touch with you with in-depth news of the work of the Veterans of Hope Project.  Since our April 2017 commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” address at Riverside Church in NYC, we’ve been very busy.  While some of you may have been keeping up with our work through the VOHP website, we haven’t always posted all of the details of our activities.  We’re thankful for those many friends who have continued to encourage and support us over the past few years and we wanted to share a fuller sense of what we have been doing.   We’ve been involved with some wonderful events in various parts of the country – workshops, symposia, readings and lectures; but we have also had some difficult losses.  Gloria’s brother (and Rachel’s cousin) Phillip Jackson, founding director of the Chicago-based Black Star Project, passed in November of last year and Makota Valdina Pinto, an Afro-Brazilian environmental justice activist and Candomblé ritual leader who was a dear friend of the Freeney-Harding family, made her transition almost two months ago.  Both Phillip and Valdina were great inspirations to us and we have been challenged to determine how best to continue cultivating and sharing their wisdoms in the world.

Other movement veterans who were friends of the VOHP and who have become ancestors in recent years include former Freedom Rider and anti-racist educational administrator, John Maguire; historian Sterling Stuckey; citizenship education leader Dorothy Cotton; former SNCC president Chuck McDew; and activist-scholar-pastor Wyatt Tee Walker. We are very much aware that in this season of unabated, abominable and outrageous injustice, countenanced and crafted by the current presidential administration, we are losing some of the most courageous and principled voices from the deep traditions of social justice organizing in our nation.  It is very disheartening sometimes.  We miss our parents/aunt/uncle — Rosemarie and Vincent (and their many colleagues and comrades in the struggle for a broader and more meaningful democracy in our country) and we call on them often for encouragement and guidance as we receive the intolerable news of the kidnapping, isolation and drugging of immigrant children under the auspices of ICE “processing”; the unceasing incarceration and brutalization of African American young people as the public education system is ruthlessly gutted and dismembered; and US-sponsored threats against democratically elected leaders in Latin America and elsewhere.

At the same time, we are also fortified by a younger generation of religious, civic and cultural leaders who carry the banner for peace and justice in our nation and beyond.  We are so proud of people like Revs. Dawn Riley Duval and Tawana Davis of Soul2Soul Sisters in Denver; Lakshmi Nair and the Satya Yoga Collective of Yoga Teachers of Color, also in Denver; Corrine Sanchez of Tewa Women United in New Mexico; Wesley Morris at the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, North Carolina; Sharrelle Barber, also of North Carolina, who created a documentary film on the assassination of Brazilian activist and progressive politician, Marielle Franco; and Sheree Brown, a Denver-based activist who led the Ancestral Herbalism Study Group, a community-education project that gathered people of color from around the city twice a month for over a year, to share practical and theoretical wisdom with one another – about everything from gardening and making essential oils to African American, Latinx, Asian and Native herbal healing traditions.   And many more…

We know this: what has always strengthened and encouraged Black, Brown and Indigenous people is our connection to our ancestral sources of support – our histories of struggle, our songs, our creativity, our humanity in the face of trauma, our grandparents’ prayers on our behalf and the love and encouragement we must pass along to our young people. 

We believe that we need to be together.  To spend time with each other – in small gatherings and large, sharing what we know of the wisdoms our elders have passed down to us, and the wisdoms we’ve learned from our own experiences.  Gathering is at the heart of our work at the Veterans of Hope Project.  Our programs are human-scale opportunities to share – mostly in small-group settings — the resources of history, spirituality and culture that have provided strength and renewal to people struggling for the expression of the fullness of their humanity in the United States and elsewhere in the world.  This is work we’ve done since our founding in 1997, work we remain committed to, and work that gives us joy.  But we have never done this work alone – and we need your continued support.  Please contribute what you can.

In the past two years, we’ve organized, co-sponsored and facilitated a number of different kinds of events – all connected to our key mission of exploring the spiritual and cultural resources for compassionate social change in the movements and traditions of people of color.  Here is a list of highlights of our recent activities:

• March 2019 – Rachel presented on Afro-Indigenous Religious Ethicsto the Soul2Soul Sisters Black women’s gathering in Denver.
• March 2019 – Gloria was awarded a Golden Institute Chicago Peace Fellowship.
• October 2018 – we crafted a day-long spiritual retreatfor students and faculty of Williams College centered around African diasporic and South Asian traditions of movement, meditation and community-building.
• September 2018 – we developed a symposium for Williams Collegeon Religion, Creativity and Environmental Ethics in the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. Sponsored by the Africana Studies Department, we brought to the campus, ritual leaders, activists and artists from Afro-Brazilian, African American and Mohawk communities for a three-day series of workshops, lectures and community conversations.
• September 2018 – In Chicago, we co-sponsored with the Black Star Project, a community celebration in honor of the birthday of longtime activist, Phillip Jackson.
• July 2018 — we helped organize the 4^thinternational consultation of the Daughters of the African Atlantic, which brought together African American and Afro-Brazilian women activists, religious leaders and educators, in Salvador, Bahia.
• May 2018 – Veteran of Hope, Ruby Sales, joined Rachel at Williams Collegefor a conversation with students and faculty about Remnants.
• April 2018 – we led a workshop on Spirituality, Self-Care and Social Justice Organizingfor the Peace Studies concentration at West Chester University, West Chester Pennsylvania
• February 2018 – at the Stella Adler School of Acting in NYC, Rachel joined two VOHP veterans – poet, Sonia Sanchez and public theologian, Ruby Sales– for a reading from Remnantsand discussion of Women’s Creativity, Spirituality and Activism.
• In January 2018, Rachel was named the Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Williams Collegewhere she taught for two semesters and developed several programs based on VOHP themes and models (see above).
• Also in January 2018 – Rachel participated in Martin Luther King Day events coordinated by the NorcalMLK organizationand did an Evensong presentation on “Martin Luther King and Candomblé” at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, CA. Later she joined scholars Clay Carson and Charles Long, and pastor/theologian Jay Williams for a public conversation titled “King, Faith and the Urgency of Now.” 
• In September 2017 we sponsored the visit to the US of Iyalorixá Valnizia Pereira, leader of the Terreiro de Cobre Candomblé community in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, ritual healer and grassroots activist on issues of racial and gender justice, religious tolerance and resilience in communities. Mãe Val spoke about conjunctions of environmental and racial justice at the Trade/itions symposium of the Caribbean Cultural Center in NYand lectured on women’s leadership in Candomblé at Spelman Collegein Atlanta.
• Also in September 2017, we sponsored “Textures of the Diaspora,” a public conversation and arts demonstration at the Carlos Museum at Emory University with Afro-Brazilian and African American textile artists and community organizers. The program was facilitated by Euneika Rogers Sipp and included Mãe Val, Vandrea Amaral and Mary Margaret Pettway from the Gee’s Bend community of Alabama, with additional translation support from Myriam Dormer.
• In June 2017, we created a workshop for the Denver Black Women’s Alliance, “Poetry, Creativity and the Divine Feminine”co-facilitated with local Denver artist Deanna Lowman.
• Finally, in April 2017, Rachel lectured at Pitzer Collegeon Mystic Spirituality and Black Women’s Activism.

Coming Events: Spring and Summer 2019

This year, in May and June, we’re excited to be hosting three Afro-Brazilian ritual elders, in partnership with our friends, Daniel and Marcia Minter, who have recently founded the Indigo Arts Alliance, in Portland, Maine, a wonderful center for arts and artists of the African diaspora.  (Please support Indigo also! They are doing great work.)  Our principal events this summer are:

• High Tea and an Interfaith Conversation Circleon faith and community building with African American and Afro-Brazilian elder women at Campbell Chapel AME church in Denver Colorado, May 19, 2pm
• Women’s Handwork– a panel and demonstration on Afro-Indigenous women’s cultural and spiritual heritage traditions, at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado May 29, 5pm
• The Welcome Table– a celebration of ritual, creativity and culinary brilliance in the African Diaspora, at the Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland, Maine, June 8 – all day

Rachel is also partnering with the Atlanta-based organization, African Pilgrimages Inc, to sponsor a ten-day spiritual sojourn to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil at the end of June this year.  VOHP would like to offer scholarship support to some of the younger people traveling with the group, and your contributions to our work with help enable us to do that.

As you can see, we remain very much engaged in “the good work” that Rosemarie and Vincent left for us to do and to share with as wide a community of companions as possible. PLEASE help us with your prayers, your encouragement and your financial contributions.  Give as generously as you can.  We depend on our friends and supporters to keep our work going.

You can donate to the Veterans of Hope Project via PayPal here. 

Or, send a check or money order to:

The Veterans of Hope Project,

c/o The Iliff School of Theology

2323 East Iliff Avenue

Denver, CO 80210

The Veterans of Hope Project is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization and your donation is tax-deductible.

Thank you, very much!

Rachel E. Harding and Gloria Smith

Co-Directors, The Veterans of Hope Project