Shining a light on opportunities to join local justice work.
We facilitate the creation and delivery of an annual symposium that highlights issues of injustice and opportunities for engagement.
One focus area of Village Engage is to engage the local faith community in matters of social justice. Topics we have covered in these forums include criminal justice reform, affordable housing, environmental justice, and systemic racism.
These events are designed to put a face on issues of inequity facing our neighbors and to create emotional connections.
Housing Our Neighbors
In March of 2019, Village Engage produced “Housing Our Neighbors” at Augusta Heights Baptist Church in Greenville. Our intent was to shine a light on the role communities of faith can be more actively engaged in the problem of affordable housing. Co-sponsored by the Greenville Housing Fund, we featured the story of how leaders at Augusta Heights Baptist Church sold a parcel of its land to an affordable housing developer. At first, the surrounding community—based on a fear of the unknown—vehemently opposed the project. But the church and developer prevailed. Today the Augusta Heights Apartments development is a resounding success.
Our event also featured a panel discussion involving experts in Greenville’s affordable housing crisis. Nearly 175 attendees then get to network with the representatives from numerous affordable housing organizations—including Habitat for Humanity, the Greenville Homeless Alliance, United Housing Connections, Rebuild Upstate, and others.
Environmental Inequity
On the evening of October 29, 2019, nearly 200 people gathered at Mountain View Baptist Church to engage a matter of a serious environmental injustice. Our intent was to highlight a specific case of how environmental hazards are often intentionally ignored in low-income communities. We featured the story of residents of the Southernside neighborhood of Greenville—who have lived with the effects of toxic coal sludge, generated by an old Duke Energy coal gasification plant. And we compared their experience to that of one in an affluent neighborhood who faced the very same problem, but who had a very different outcome.
This event was co-sponsored by the South Carolina Environmental Law Project (SCELP), Upstate Forever, and Conservation Voters of South Carolina (CVSC).
Community Remembrance Project
Village Engage is proud to be a coalition member of the Community Remembrance Project of Greenville County, South Carolina. In partnership with Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Alabama, this local coalition has been formed in order to confront the legacy of racial terror in our own community.
Over the next several years, we will conduct a number of public education events, memorial services, and historic marker installation ceremonies that will honor the lives of those who died by lynching in Greenville County at the hands of white supremacists. To learn more about our work with the coalition, click here.
Click here for the Community Remembrance Project website, and be sure to follow the CRP Facebook Page to stay informed about upcoming events.
