The Ubuntu Cultural Education Circle is a network of like-minded educators/scholars, justice organizations and activists, and Afro-indigenous communities facilitating the build-out of the educational/learning infrastructure for the Ubuntu movement.

A cultural transformation of society starts with self-awareness, knowledge and skills as essential capacities for social/climate change.  The Highlander School and the Penn Center  in South Carolina, for example, were such centers for the last, seemingly, impossible movement – the desegregation of America.  It was the learning hub for everyday folks to take individual and collective action in their own communities to change where they spent their money, how they would change policies and laws, and how they would organize and work together.

We are envisioning the cultural reweaving of traditional, ancestral and innovative Afro and pan-indigenous world views, values, and practices as an integral path to healing people, place and planet. 

We invoke past, present and future knowledge that support our capacity to regenerate and re-imagine our partnership with the trees, the soils, the ecosystems, the water bodies and restore our right relationship with all that is animate and the spirits that are our relations. 

For we are listening 

We are Cultural Creatives who are speaking, dancing, singing and imagining the world our hearts know is possible.  For we are listening to the ancient ones and wisdom keepers. We are sensing into the present and leaning to the future; inviting in new story-tellers, artists, poems, songs, ceremonies and those cultural creatives who already know and envision this beautiful collective ethos.  We can and will rewrite the story that calls us forth to a new way of being. 

To heal the HeART and the Spirit (cultural arts/rituals/ceremonies, decolonize & raising our relationship to liberation and consciousness)

The work currently invites:

• Inaugural 2024 Ubuntu National Storytelling/Arts showcase

The Ubuntu Economic Program works at the intersection of climate and community.  It engages community residents in eco-system restoration of degraded urban and rural lands within low-income, Black and Indigenous communities.  It utilizes traditional world views and practices – rituals, taboos, Afro-indigenous ecologies –  to inspire greater respect, appreciation, connection to, and stewardship of the land among Afro-descendent communities.

The program includes policy, project and skills development.  The co-benefits include : 1)  leveraging $1.5 billion in federal investments for community-driven land restoration projects, 2) increase nature-based solutions to climate mitigation in communities that need it most; 3) decreased community  vulnerability to climate change,  4) Opportunity Youth trained in regenerative land skills,  5) diversity in the environmental/climate sector, and 6) community and personal healing.  

Goal:

Increase policies and community initiatives to steward the land and builds alternative economies that reduce consumption based emissions to heal people, place and planet

Strategy:

• Policy Development
• Develop culturally relevant workforce and career curricula/pathways;
• Initiate pilot projects in targeted sites/cities;