Near the end of a second pandemic year, we’re pausing to mark a third-annual “Gratitude Tuesday.” It’s our RCND practice of holding space within a crowded season for the kind of gratitude that—as poet David Whyte has it—“arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.” And hear us say, friends: even 20 exasperating months into discarding best-laid plans for our work together, just being awake within this Coalition is to be profoundly grateful for you, living generously among us.
Twenty-nine years on, this embodied love and labor is what fuels RCND’s pursuit of boundless belonging across every social distance. Paying close attention to that shared journey this Tuesday, we find ourselves giving particular thanks for:
- New investments pushing us forward. To begin with the measurable—your generosity in making 2020 our largest giving year ever. Or—with support from a dedicated $20,000 investment by the G.A. Laplaca Family Fund (of Triangle Community Foundation) in growing our RCND staff—a 2021 shaped by twice the paid staff hours of just two years ago. And all this buoyed by the incalculable contributions of an RCND leadership community (board, staff, and three collaborative leadership circles) more robust and representative than ever before.
- New spaces to inhabit. Like reentry support teams in five new congregations (now 24 ‘faith teams’ in total), or still more new avenues for RJ conferencing (73 community-sourced RJ facilitations to date). Or two community education experiments (Restorative Justice 101; The Spiritual Crisis of Gun Violence) likely to be perennial offerings for years to come. And even the unexpected opportunity of a spacious new home among like-minded friends in the renovated education building of Elizabeth Street UMC.
- Old stories drawing us (back) together. Because it wasn’t a full week before our best hopes for 2021 seemed frail indeed, and it takes little imagination to notice similar fractures alive and growing in the Durham we love. And still yet—every single day, in a dizzying array of paths through our city—you neighbors we call a Coalition offered precious glimpses of a beautiful, broken all-of-us that we’ve yet to enact…or destroy. 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.
Short version? Disappointing as it’s often been, 2021 has been another very good year to be the peculiar Coalition you empower us to be. So headed into a month that blends thanksgiving with fundraising and pits fresh hope against familiar hopelessness, it feels only right to take stock, pay attention, and offer a simple, sincere:
THANK YOU!!
Ben Haas (Director, RCND)
11/2021