From Derry-Londonderry
It is a story of two rivers: the Mississippi River and the River Foyle. It is a story of two cities: Greenville and Derry-Londonderry. Different continents, different environments, different situations. And yet there are striking similarities. Each is defined by divisions; with people divided by identity and by history. Each is a story of good people in local communities who now struggle to share a land that two peoples have lived on divisively for generations.
In June of 2005, the Mastery Foundation hosted Community Empowerment Programs in both Greenville, Mississippi, and Derry-Londonderry, Northern Ireland. What is the Community Empowerment Program? It is a two-day program that brings together grassroots leaders already at work in building their communities and in healing past divisions. Typical participants include peace workers and youth counselors, bankers and business people, librarians and local clergy, local activists and volunteers, school principals and teachers, student leaders and social service workers.
In two short days, this program produces profound relationships across traditional divides, it instills ways of being and speaking that significantly increase participants’ power to make a difference, it enables participants to find their own capacity to create a new future that is not just a modified past, and it prepares them for the conversations that dominate in their communities and that have served to keep the past in place.
Greenville, Mississippi
The Mississippi River has spent about five thousand years building up the Delta topsoil to where it is among the richest and deepest on earth. It is that soil which attracted the cotton empires, and the cotton empires which dealt in slavery. Cotton magnates and trades people, pioneers and fortune seekers, slaves and slave traders; they all transformed the Delta from a vast, forested swamp to a vast farmland. Their descendants still live in the Mississippi Delta, in small cities like Greenville, left to make sense of their past and, perhaps, to create a new future for themselves and their children.
A very diverse group of community leaders showed up for the Community Empowerment Program at St James Episcopal Church which organized the program and donated the space for it. There were young and old, women and men, black and white, business people and community workers – even the mayor came to be with us in the morning of day one.
Although this was our fifth year in Mississippi, it was the first year in which we offered this program in Greenville, Mississippi. Last year we offered the Making a Difference workshop for clergy and those who minister in Greenville and several participants returned for Community Empowerment. They reported their excitement at how our programs built on one another, and they are eagerly awaiting a third program!
In the beginning, it was a group of friendly yet wary individuals entering the room separately; each struggling to make a difference in the areas of unity and racial reconciliation. By the end there was an experience of going into the world as community, with the power to develop community everywhere they go.
Longtime Greenville residents shared they were truly able to see Greenville’s future filled with possibilities. One longtime and very civic-minded resident surprised many in the room when he said, "I now know change is possible. I just didn't know that before." And one grassroots leader said that his community would never look the same to him; instead of one split and tired community in Greenville, he now sees that every possibility creates a new community.
Derry-Londonderry, Northern Ireland
Across the Atlantic we find the City of Derry-Londonderry in Northern Ireland. Even its name tells us something about the struggle to reconcile its two major identities. It is a place where the past six hundred years seem to have happened yesterday. And, like the rest of Northern Ireland, the City of Derry-Londonderry was deeply torn during the thirty years of what is politely called “the troubles”. Today, seven years after the troubles officially ended with the Good Friday Accord, there remain two sides of the national and religious identity. The city is called Derry by its Catholic-Irish population, Londonderry by its Protestant-British population, and Derry-Londonderry by those who stand for its reconciliation.
This was the third year in which we offered the Community Empowerment Program in Derry-Londonderry. Once again, we held it within the old walled City above the River Foyle, in a community center called “The Junction”. And again, it attracted new members to the Mastery Foundation’s network of active participants in Northern Ireland.
One memorable moment in the Derry-Londonderry program involved a participant committed to supporting troubled youth in finding a good place for themselves in an inclusive society. But she had been finding herself getting increasingly frustrated by their crises, and needing to fix what she saw as their frailties. During the course of the program, she declared that she is a stand for all youth being whole and complete just as they are. From this stand, she can see her work as truly supportive and not needing to fix the teens that look up to her.
This was the first year where we began building a local team capable of producing and delivering this program; from enrollment activity, to coordinating logistics, to leading parts of the program itself. These individuals join another local team whose members are well along in being able to create and conduct Mastery’s Making a Difference workshop in Northern Ireland. It is an emerging success story in nurturing the local capacity to convene cross-community gatherings.
We can make a difference
In each city we can see vivid examples of the fundamental work that is challenging people all over the world: the work of healing divisions and of building inclusive communities. We don’t need to know the answers, or what should be done. We only need to know that every community already has what it needs, that each place has local leaders already at work on the challenges of our time, and that we all have an opportunity to support them.