Creating Brave Spaces To Build Trust And Connection

Town Hall Notes: 

Cornelius and Dave review some of the principles that help to guide Leadership Foundations, especially St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Way of Proceeding. This allowed for St. Ignatius to send people out on mission throughout the world and provided them the freedom they needed to respond to the work of the Holy Spirit in a particular context. Likewise, Leadership Foundations is exploring a Way Of Proceeding for its network.

Rev. Jen Bailey, Founder and Executive Director of Faith Matters Network (18:40) discusses the project she has been working on since 2016. The project is The People Suffer. The idea is to invite people who come from different backgrounds to share a meal and discuss how to create places of feeling welcome and places of welcoming others. The focus is to help diverse people build relationships and trust in order to work with each other and transform their communities.

Rev. Bailey answers questions from the audience (40:45) about the Daring Compassion Chaplaincy Program.

Oliver Richmond, Kingdom Partners, Leadership Foundations in Chatanooga, TN is introduced (47:13). Kingdom Partners began as a group of African American pastors coming together to strengthen their churches and increase community involvement. The work they were doing attracted the attention of a local foundation and wanted Kingdom Partners to find a way to get African American, Latino, and White pastors to start working together in the community. After training, this multi-cultural group embraced government, education, and business and went from being a church-focused group to an organization that started group initiatives within the community and later joined Leadership Foundations.