One grief-filled year ago, we declared our first RCND “Gratitude Tuesday” by pausing to give thanks for you, the hundreds of folks whose love and labor continue to build this Coalition day in, week out, decades on. And in ways we couldn’t have fully imagined then—as ever more urgency and scarcity crowd in upon every good work—gratitude feels the exact right way to spend a day. So friends, hear us say. In so many half-forgotten day-month-weeks from then until now: we have been profoundly grateful for each of you.
This was another year where the very idea of a Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham felt audacious amidst the violence manifest in our streets, our systems, and our souls. Sitting home in our best effort at communal safety, many of us reckoned anew with the everyday social distances that inequitably distribute safety within our human family. And yet just alongside—whether you were running a non-profit or not(!)—lurked that subtle pandemic temptation to narrate triumphant paths through demonstrably awful circumstances.
In all these things, 2020 was a very good year to be who you made us to be. Not some cheery amalgam of all we’ve accomplished, but the beautiful, broken embodiment of who we still might be together. In the unprecedented fractures of this season, we never ceased to find deep resolve in the unlikely belonging of this peculiar Coalition. Church folks and agnostics, faith communities and government agencies, humans mired within the toxic binaries of a dehumanizing legal system—all tracing our deepest communal pain across barriers of incarceration, apathy, disadvantage, and fear.
Your values, your risk, your imagination, your bodied investment—and yes, sometimes the thin, measurable reality of your money—made RCND an organism well-equipped to endure. You gave us vision to begin again alongside dozens of families navigating public grief during a racialized pandemic. You lined unexpected paths back into community for dozens more neighbors exiting incarceration that threatened their very breath, welcoming them into safe housing and supportive relationship. And you lent us the persistence to keep asking “What must done to repair the harm?” in an ever wider range of restorative justice conferencing, and well beyond.
You’ll find a further sampling of RCND during Covid in a growing list of dispatches on our website. And like any good-profit, we’ll be reaching out in coming days to invite further investment in the journey we’re on together. But this Gratitude Tuesday, our fondest hope is that gratitude fuels more gratitude—that you might spend a quiet moment remembering just how immeasurably much you are worth, or perhaps glimpsing that same miracle in some neighbor yet distant. Wherever that imagination leads will be worth the trip. But for our part, today’s journey (of many words) ends in a simple, sincere:
THANK YOU!!
Ben Haas (Director, RCND)
12/2020