The Greenspon Center is committed to strengthening social justice movements by training and educating community members to become impactful organizers and sustaining changemakers in the many and diverse personal and professional contexts in which they work and live.
Our Social Justice and Community Organizing (SJCO) educational offerings provide applicable skills for organizing. Our 2021-2022 workshops will celebrate and support Charlotte’s communities of organizers and changemakers.
As we design and launch a new SJCO program, we are joined by Rev. Vahisha Hasan and Holly Roach Knight as our scholar activists and program design consultants. By bringing their academic perspectives and their organizing experience, our scholar activists are working to root this emerging program deeply in praxis with vital feedback loops for reflecting on and learning from our experience organizing.
Rev. Vahisha Hasan is a faith-rooted organizer working at the intersection of faith, social justice, and mental health. As Executive Director of Movement in Faith, Rev. Vahisha Hasan is deeply invested in ways activist and faith communities further healing and collective liberation. She is also the Rapid Response Coordinator for TRACC4Movements (Trauma Response and Crisis Care) and Director of SEAL Initiatives at American Baptist College (Social Justice, Equity, Advocacy, and Leadership). She is a powerful public speaker, transformative facilitator, social justice trainer, minister, and writer with a deeply prophetic voice and imagination for how faith communities can be an active part of healing and collective liberation. Vahisha holds a dual Master’s of Divinity and Master’s of Mental Health Counseling with an Education Specialist Certification from Gardner-Webb University and a bachelor’s degree in Communications with a concentration in Interpersonal Organization from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Vahisha is proudly born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Holly Roach Knight is a long-time social justice organizer and recent recipient of two masters degrees, an MA in Social Justice & Community Organizing from Prescott College, and an MA in Contemplative Education from Naropa University. She studies conflict in social change and is developing a body of work around navigating harm and repair in the organizing process. As a systems thinker for social change, Holly challenges us to learn from our organizing and consider how interconnected we are. As a proponent of contemplative social change, Holly urges us to steward our own inner change as a vital contribution to our work as change makers. Holly is also a yoga teacher and a student of cultural somatics. She lives in Asheville, NC.
Come learn from them as part of our first SJCO program.
Listening Project: Learning from Charlotte’s history of Organizing – the Successes, Failures and Emerging Needs, Monday, October 25, 2021, from 7-9 pm, with Reverend Vahisha Hasan M.Div., M.A., Ed.S., Holly Roach Knight, and Rabbi Judy Schindler.
At the Greenspon Center we recognize the need for research on Charlotte’s history of organizing – the successes and the failures, the future needs. We are commencing a significant community Listening Project and invite you to be an interviewer/researcher. Researchers will be asked to attend one training and complete three interviews with Charlotte organizers. Join us as we set the stage for this important work and begin to amass a body of research from which we all can learn and build upon as a community. If you know of Charlotte organizers (past or present) who should be interviewed, let us know that, as well. To take part in our community research or to learn more about this program, contact Judy Schindler, schindlerj@queens.edu.
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Congratulations to these powerful Women!!