OUR CURRENT PROGRAMS

Jonathan Daniels and Samuel Younge Institute

The Jonathan Daniels and Samuel Younge Institute for Justice and Nonviolence is named after two Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee activists who were murdered during the Southern Freedom Movement. The Institute honors the work of Jonathan and Samuel through its Daniels and Younge Fellows Program.

Through the program, The SpiritHouse Project: (1) supports and prepares a new generation of peace and justice workers who want to discern a call to social justice and nonviolence; (2) strengthens their courage, hope, resolve and reason to do this work; (3) prepares them to play leading roles in public policy debates about issues such as poverty, prison industrial complex, militarism, and the shrinking budget for human needs, voting rights, privacy and judicial issues, and neo-conservatism; and (4) helps grassroots communities meet their urgent need for trained and committed volunteers or staff.

Daniels and Younge Fellows undergo a summer to a year's formation process that includes an interdisciplinary curriculum of classroom work, meetings and conversations with older Southern Freedom Movement activists, spiritual reflection, field work, public speaking and research.

Many of our Fellows come from poor communities and would be denied this extraordinary experience without a stipend. Their participation is crucial since the most pressing needs of grassroots community are volunteer staff and long-term staff.

In less than two and a half years, The SpiritHouse Project trained 15 fellows from economically disenfranchised communities as well as from universities around the country. Our class of 2002 included a Kenyan American, Trinidadian Indian American, two European Americans, and an El Salvadoran American. Our class of 2003 included five African American women from economically disenfranchised communities. Two of our fellows were single heads of households. Our Fellow for 2004 is a first year African American male student at Howard Divinity School.

Many Fellows lack the historical knowledge of the past movements that enable them to place their work and calls as justice workers into a continuum of struggle and victory. Moreover, they come lacking intergenerational connections. Cut off from this history and connection, Fellows often come to The SpiritHouse Project dispirited and feeling very powerless and sometimes very angry. Often during the first few weeks of the Institute, we spend a lot of time listening to their suffering, aspirations and fears. It is as much healing work as it is teaching work.

The class of 2002 held a national press conference that called the nation away from the USA Patriot Act and an endless war on terrorism to a more open democracy where the U.S. uses our resources to build up a better world at home and abroad.

Additionally, they also conducted a national campaign that shed light on the economic disparity in the nation as well as the growing crisis of the prison industrial complex that holds more than 800,000 African American men as a captive workforce. They asked this question: What does it mean for the men, their community and the nation that the US is willing to invest more in their captivity than in their human and spiritual potentiality?