Faith-Based Reparative Justice: A Tool for Racial Healing

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Reparations offering: You are invited to offer a reparative payment to support a Philadelphia Black grassroots organization that reparationWorks works with closely as a way to substantively commit to reparations with your registration. There is no minimum requirement. This is an offering to release resources as you enter the space to deeply consider and commit to reparations.

Please mark whatever you contribute: “Philly reparative offering” and you can contribute here, through reparationWorks.

Join faith leaders and congregants in an in-depth conference and intensive course to learn about the multiple dimensions of reparations and reparative justice. Discover how you can invite your congregation/temple/mosque deeply into this work in a multi-faith movement for reparations, with a vision for deep truth-telling, repair, and wealth redistribution with the faith community moving toward this work as a spiritual calling and moral imperative.

For white-majority congregations, how do we move towards healing and offering repair? For Black-majority congregations, how do we move towards healing and articulating reparations requests?

We will combine a democratically structured study and action oriented developmental path toward reparations with guest speakers from among the most powerful voices for faith-based reparations in the country. The goal of this conference is to equip participants with solid tools for moving their faith-based reparations organizing forward. Additionally, the conference will connect faith-based folks walking this same path so that they can continue to support one another in deepening and moving toward the deepest repair possible: relationally, spiritually, and through the transfer of resources.

Participants are encouraged to attend in teams of 2 to 5 from each faith community in order to become an organizing team within your congregation.

This course grew out of the Rise up for Reparations campaign in Philadelphia to engage 100 majority-white congregations in sincere reparations work that is accountable to Black congregations and Black grassroots organizations. Though we will focus on Philadelphia-area congregations, congregations from other areas of the country ready to send teams are welcome to join us.

Faith leaders’ action planning will be buttressed by monthly support and accountability meetings after the course, bringing together the faith leaders that participated in the cohort to move forward their congregational organizing plans.

Download the flyer to share with your community

This conference is co-sponsored and co-organized by reparationWorks and the Rise up for Reparations Steering Committee. It is offered with the support of congregations from the Rise up for Reparations Community of Practice Cohort.

Leader(s)

Anthony Smith is co-director of reparationWorks. He is a West Philly based organizer and educator. He worked in the Philadelphia school district and in other youth development sectors, primarily as a Social Studies teacher for 7 years. Anthony has been organizing primarily around addressing police violence and building independent political power for Black and Brown community members through direct action, political education, and mutual aid. Through identifying issues with policing and carceral punishment, he understood that a mass relocation of resources must occur not only to address the harm that has been done, but to prevent carceral and exploitative institutions from operating in the first place. He has worked with and contributed to organizations such as Philly for REAL Justice, the Philly Black Radical Collective, Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Abolition School, and Food not Bombs Solidarity.

Dr. Bryan Nichols is an L.A. based Clinical Psychologist with a practice focusing on adults, families and teens. He was also a long time consultant with a Community Based Organization where he was the Supervising Psychologist for a city gang prevention and  intervention program. This work yielded insights leading to activism on behalf of reparations to African Americans for the past several years, resulting in numerous public presentations and several published articles. He is a co-author of the foundational article for this work, Transforming Ghosts into Ancestors: Un-silencing the Psychological Case for Reparations to Descendants of American Slavery.

Lucy Duncan is co-director of reparationWorks, which cultivates a movement for faith-based reparations in Philadelphia and beyond. In that role she serves as coordinator of the Rise Up for Reparations campaign. She served as Director of Friends Relations for AFSC for 10 years. In that role she was lead organizer and co-facilitator for Radical Acting in Faith for white people and co-conceived and birthed the ongoing Quakers Uprooting Racism community of practice project. She has published many articles on working to end white supremacy including the 2023 “Reparations and Transgenerational Healing” in Friends Journal. She was the co-chair of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Commission on Faith-Based and Interfaith Affairs. She has been a storyteller for over 20 years and has worked with Quaker meetings on telling stories for racial justice and of spiritual experience. From 1999 until 2011 she played several roles at FGC including Director of Communications and co-manager of QuakerBooks. She owned and managed her own children’s bookstore in Omaha, The Story Monkey, and was a member of a storytelling troupe, The Five Bright Chicks. She co-hosted a radio show on NE NPR for several years called Storytelling Tapestry. She is a member of Green Street Friends Meeting (PhYM) and proud mom of a grown son, Simon.

Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart, a Blackqueer daughter of Detroit, is a minister, professor, and movement strategist. She is so grateful to be able to make a life doing the work she was made for – preaching, teaching, and plotting resistance to inhumane political, economic, and religious systems. Naomi is the Strategic Partnerships Director at Political Research Associates, a social justice research and strategy center, and in the past has worked as a faith organizer and director for POWER Interfaith, the National LGBTQ Task Force, and the Mayor’s Office of Public Engagement in the city of Philadelphia. She teaches emerging scholars of religion and theology at Villanova University, Arcadia University, and in the Prison Education Program of Eastern University. From 2022-2024, Naomi was the Government Fellow for the Religion and Public Life Initiative at Harvard Divinity School. She shares her life with her spouse and daughter and is proudly affiliated with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM).

Reverend Jacqueline (Jackie) Newsome has made it her life’s mission to faithfully fight for the freedoms of those swept up in the American system of Mass Incarceration. After earning her Bachelor of Arts in Politics from New York University, Rev. Jackie continued her studies at The University of Chicago Law School. A year after graduating with her Juris Doctor, Rev. Jackie enrolled in Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. Her thesis, “Jesus Loves Guilty People: Making The Case for the Black Church to End Mass Incarceration,” highlighted her theological perspectives on why the Black Church must abide by abolitionist principles to disrupt the prison industrial complex. After completing her studies at Candler in 2019, Rev. Jackie brought her passion, skills, and expertise to Philadelphia to work as an Assistant Public Defender for the Defender Association of Philadelphia until 2024. Her commitment to the church, community, and social justice led her to her current role as Assistant Pastor at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, where she continues to make a significant impact.

,O is a Friend and co-clerk of the Racial Healing and Wholeness Committee at Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting. They engage in environmental racial justice work as a community activist in the Philadelphia area. They have served as Elder for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PhYM) and have facilitated programming for Annual Sessions Spiritual Formation Retreat. ,O has also led On Truth & Transformation workshops with PhYM Quaker Life Counsel, exploring the transformative practice of deep listening to increase our capacity for healing through compassionate responses to incidents of racial wounding.

Dr. David Ragland is one of the co-founders and co-executive director of the Truth Telling Project and the director of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign. David is a writer, scholar and activist. David recently published a series on reparations in Yes Magazine. He currently teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Community Liberation, Depth and EcoPsycology. Previously, David taught at Bucknell University, Juniata College and Southern Illinois University. David’s areas of activism and research focus on: moral injuries and the possibilities of transforming violence and intergenerational trauma against vulnerable populations in the U.S.; envisioning and working for a world with reduced violence on all levels; and the intersections of critical race issues, decoloniality, restorative justice, peace education, and Africana and Existentialist philosophies. Furthermore, David is concerned with how our society conceives justice as retributive and proposes a shift toward restorative justice to transform communities and criminal justice systems. His analysis is drawn from the radical teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr., particularly King’s description of the “triplet evils of racism, militarism, and materialism” as an ever present part of American life.

Woullard Lett is currently serving as the Male Co-Chair of the New England Chapter and former Male Co-Chair of the national board of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA); former president and former education committee chair of the Manchester, NH branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP), and former board president and former Funding Panel member of the Haymarket People’s Fund regional community foundation over the years. He is the former Leadership Ministry Associate and former New England Regional Lead for the UUA. Woullard has worked in nonprofit management and community development as a college administrator for Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) and adjunct faculty member for SNHU and Springfield College. During his career, Woullard has provided technical assistance for government agencies, national community development intermediaries, and local community organizations.

Karen “Magic Fingaz” Smith, Brooklyn Native, Philly Resident, is a Professional Percussionist, Playwright, Poet, Director, Teaching Artist, Curator and now a member of the Philadelphia Musician’s Union Local 77 !!! Karen is a recipient of several grants including Leeway Foundation’s Art and Change and Illuminate the Arts Grants . Ms. Smith is the Founder, Artistic Director and Lead Percussionist of The Karen Smith Experience (formerly called Weez the Peeples) and Sistahs Laying Down Hands Collectives. Called “Sounds of Freedom” by Philadelphia Inquirer, Ms. Smith has worked with many individual artists, groups, theatrical production companies, studio recordings and in October of 2023, created a week long of artistic events, Breast Cancer Awareness festival featuring Breast Cancer Surgeon, Dr. Monique Gary.

“As of August 1, 2023, I’m delighted to share that I’ve received a Pew Fellowship from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage!! Collaborations are the essence of my creative Journey and I am sure so many to come. It definitely feels like it’s a highlight sharing OMAZING energies with various communities, organizations and individual artists! Truly One Nation Under a Drumbeat!! Possible is Possible is my daily mantra!”

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