City Hub

Sponsorship

PRAYER

Action steps include:

  • Partnering with African American Congregations in your city to develop prayer walks and prayer vigils in a variety of different neighborhoods.

  • Share city and neighborhood prayer concerns monthly.

  • Invite partnering congregations to a city-wide prayer event that occurs annually.

  • Formulate prayer groups and/or partners that specifically pray for new relationships and transformed hearts in the city.

Launch a city-wide cohort

Action steps include:

  • Identify and enlist a City Director

  • Host a listening session to cast the vision to Senior Pastors for the cohort.

  • Determine the best day and time to meet monthly and select the venue.

  • Build consensus on the curriculum and format for the cohort sessions.

  • Commit to ‘No Pastor Shows-up Alone’ modeling cross-cultural friendship.

  • City Director meets once-a-month with champions from other cities.

Learn & proximate

Action steps include:

  • Read The New Jim Crow, The Color of Compromise, I Bring the Voices of My People or Divided By Faith.

  • Watch “Just mercy,” “13th, “”I am Not Your Negro, “ or “When They See Us.”

  • Host movie nights or book clubs around the above selection or others.

  • Participate in a local or national virtual JustUS Conversations.

  • Race & Grace Monday Prayer Initiative with 24/7 Prayer Network.

  • Hold a service to lament for complicit participation in radically unjust systems.

Financial INVESTMENT

Action steps include:

  • Raise the financial capital needed to serve as a Beyond Words Movement City Hub.

  • Enlist City Pastors to serve on a Council of Advisors Committee.

  • Host an Annual Beyond Words Movement Friend-Raiser event.

  • Create a Justice Fund that will receive ongoing donations and require that 50% of the team overseeing the fund is African Americans.

  • Recapitalize African American banks by transferring local resourced churches money to a Black owned bank. (Justice Deposits)

Grow a local network

Action steps include:

  • Enlist Leaders from the Business and Civic community to join your city network.

  • Leverage the expertise of local Thought Leaders committed to Racial Advocacy and Racial Justice in your local context.

  • Participate the Beyond Movement National event held annually on May 25th in remembrance of George Floyd.

Organize & Mobilize

Action steps include:

  • Actively participate in Urban Education and Housing Reform Initiatives.

  • Seek out Policy Champions in your geographical location seeking systemic and structural institutional transformation. (Ex: Social Change: https://socialchange.site)

  • Join and participate in organizing meetings lead by community groups in your city.

  • Attend community organizing training.

  • JustBUSINESS: Empowering the Church to generate racial equity in employment by leveraging the social capital within churches and establishing new networks of connection between churches or different races.

For more information on launching a City Hub in partnership with the BEYOND WORDS Movement – please contact:

Rev. Alvin C. Bibbs, Sr. | Visionary Leader

Email: alvin.bibbs@thejja.org

Phone: 708-373-3925