» About Us

How We Began 

Fetzer Summary Report 

A Call to Beloved Community (2007)

About Beloved Communities

Beloved Communities: Growing our Souls is an initiative begun in 2004 to identify, explore and form a network of communities committed to and practicing the profound pursuit of justice, radical inclusivity, democratic governance, health and wholeness, and social / individual transformation. It is informed by the 1965-68 visionary thinking of Martin Luther King Jr., combined with indigenous cosmology and social ethics. This initiative is guided by a steering committee of Grace Lee Boggs, Shea Howell, Nelson Johnson, John Maguire, Kathy Sanchez and Shirley Strong.

The Beloved Community Steering Committee is comprised of the following individuals:

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 respirit Detroit from the ground up. She writes a column in the weekly Michigan Citizen, and does a monthly commentary on WORT-FM, Madison, Wisconsin. 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.

Shea Howell www.boggscenter.org

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 a professor at Oakland University where she is chair of the Department of Rhetoric, Communication & Journalism. Howell has worked on numerous community and cultural issues in Detroit and around the country.

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.

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 www.tewawomenunited.org

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 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. In 2002, Project Change became a partner in a national joint anti-racism venture with the Claremont Graduate University Institute for Democratic Renewal, where Strong serves as a senior fellow.

Rachel Harding (Consulting Writer) www.veteransofhope.org

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  the author of a book on Afro-Brazilian religion  and 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.