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Our translocal membership program’s expansion within recent months has brought Ujima into contact with brilliant thought leaders and partners from across the country.
The Center for Transforming Communities (CTC) supports equitable community change, from efforts to minimize the adverse impact of community development, to power and capacity building support for residents. The Center builds neighborhood democracies through shared decision-making practices that support the resiliency of the neighborhoods it serves.
We spoke with Justin Merrick, Executive Director of the Center for Transforming Communities, to learn more about how CTC approaches democracy and ownership via culture and narrative–and to talk about how we can reconceive Black health and wealth.
Ujima: What is the Center for Transforming Communities’ mission?
Justin Merrick: Our mission is to cultivate neighborhood democracies in the City of Memphis. We operate across the city, and we use a hub system– 8 hubs, which cover 24 different neighborhoods. These hubs facilitate our organizing of resident bases, which inform a kind of base-building practice centered on narrative shifts. The goal for us is for these shifts to be part and parcel of transformative work that builds solidarity and healing within our neighborhoods and communities. We do all of this to build relationships and to eventually materialize campaigns and wins, from policy initiatives to the formation of land trusts–we started the first land trust in Memphis, and now we have a citywide coalition for land trusts.
Overall, our work is to develop communities without displacing people, and to build an ecosystem from community cultural power, which I find similar to Ujima.
How do you shift narrative, and disseminate these shifts?
We're at an emergent stage of that; we've been collecting data and stories from our neighborhoods, as part of a curriculum we’re developing called Measuring Love. This curriculum is the foundation of all of our work in systems and in neighborhoods–it’s collecting qualitative data that's authentic to our communities, to give context to the quantitative, right? When we talk about poverty or we talk about wealth, a lot of times narratives are created that may not necessarily align with what exists. For instance, the zip code 38106 in South Memphis: folks have said it's the poorest zip code in the nation–but to us, it's actually one of the richest, because it is home to Stax, the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement (akin to Detroit's Motown). That's not how we think of poverty, and that's not how we think of wealth, so part of our narrative shift is that we want to redefine wealth and wealthful practices. Wealth must center black joy as something that we aggregate and bring together.
The Measuring Love work is really an opportunity to look at resilience patterns within our community and neighborhoods and celebrate them. All of our connectors [researchers] submit around 10 to 15 stories a week of their work in the neighborhoods or communities and those stories inform what we call “pivots,” things to change in pivoting towards transformative practices within the community. An example of a pivot would be worship of the written word, a part of dominant cultural practice. We know that the legacy of storytelling is really passing oral traditions down; yet we often believe that something becomes real when it's written on paper, so how do we resist that belief? We must understand that everything we do within our storytelling, including songwriting and music, is how we archive our legacy. Another example of a pivot would be fear of open conflict; that's a part of white supremacy. We want to make that pivot to direct, open and constructive feedback, which in the south it can be a challenge; but our connectors are trained on working through generative conflict, and creating spaces where folks can be bold and actually speak their truth. We create narrative shifts from this repository of stories that suggest new practices.
On Juneteenth, we actually translate those stories into music performances and art, to share them. Even earlier this year, for MLK day, we created original songs based on these narrative themes and worked with the Freedom Singers to perform them.
It’s inspiring to hear how the Center for Transforming Communities is approaching culture as it arises in conversation with its constituent communities. Why are culture and narrative the entry points for CTC?
Culture is the way to enter because it creates a sense of belonging, which seeds solidarity. When folks feel like they belong in something, when they feel ownership, they can be vulnerable because they are safe and they are comfortable in a space. From here, we build solidarity and healing, and from healing we build power. These are the necessary steps: folks feeling like they should belong in a community, that they have that right or entitlement, that they have autonomy in decision-making–that’s how we build power within, as opposed to power with or power over. That’s essential to our practice.
Who are partners and peers that the Center for Transforming Community has in Memphis, and nationally?
I'm meeting with some of them tonight! There’s Young Gifted and Green, which is an environmental justice group we’ve been working with for the past 5 years; and Memphis Artists for Change, who focuses on decarceration; we also work with the Black Housing Coalition, and the Black Clergy Collaborative who really focuses on housing. Memphis Tilt is one of our newest partners, working on food systems; we’re also in relationship with Free Hearts, and we work with them on decarceration and land trusts.
We're partnering with some folks nationally as well: BLIS (Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty), for example, and the Culture & Community Power Fund, as well as BARHII in Oakland (Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative). You all would be a national translocal partner too, of course.
How do you envision this trans-local membership with Ujima moving forward: what are things that we can learn from one another, ways that we can support one another, et cetera?
The exchange that could ultimately happen might be one of cultural tourism; I don’t yet know if everybody would be aligned with this, but imagine the exchange between, say, Memphis, Boston, New Orleans, and other cities and sites along the Underground Railroad. It’s also important for Black folks in the field to be able to return to their roots; every time you talk to somebody from Detroit or Boston, wherever, they’ve got family down south. We all do, because that's where most of us are coming from, right? So how do we return back to some of that?
What we want to offer the network on our end is Measuring Love. The vision and goal here would be to establish not just a local, but a national repository of stories that foster a different way of thinking about black health and wealth. Measuring Love talks about mind knowing, heart knowing, spirit knowing, and body knowing as different ways of understanding and relating in the universe–I’m thinking about functioning in spirit time as opposed to traditional time, functioning within Black Imagination and thinking of that as a force.
On healing: there's all this invisible, unseen context that informs us. Most folks don't even know they're unconscious, and there's a lot of unconscious awareness of trauma. How do we make the invisible more visible, so that we can be prepared for investments to actually create something new and transformative?
What's next for the Center?
I want to do three trips internationally, to reconnect to our roots that have been fractured so we have a global understanding of the world and so we are not disconnected from Africa.
The first step is building a norm for a kind of ‘right of return;’ so within our hubs, programming return trips for folks while at the same time building up spaces for cultural tourism and entrepreneurship while on the continent so we aren’t engaging in an extractive way.
We’d like to visit Ethiopia–are you Ethiopian?
I am, actually, <laughs>.
We’d like to visit Ethiopia, because it's a space that hasn't been colonized; West Africa–likely Ghana–because that's where most of us were transported from; and Brazil, because much of the Transatlantic Black population was transported there in the slave trade. We’re planting the seeds for this cross-cultural learning now.
We also hope to continue to connect Black and Indigenous populations, planting the seeds for those interrelationships as a form of praxis within alternative healing and alternative economic spaces.
Justin Merrick (he/him) is a producer, composer, arranger, choreographer, songwriter, writer, director, curator, and curriculum designer. As a musical artist, he's been Grammy-nominated and worked across multiple genres as a performer and educator. Merrick is also a creative consultant that curates experiences, processes and artistic works to address and provide reprieve from the social ailments that pervade society. He advises nonprofits, social enterprises, businesses, artists, entrepreneurs, arts organizations and individuals on brand management, community engagement, operational infrastructure, strategic vision and audience development. Merrick has worked with the Center for Transforming Communities for seven years, and has been the Executive Director for six years.
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