The Children’s Defense Fund

Born in Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964 and the Civil Rights Movement, CDF Freedom Schools invite young people, K-12, into an educational immersion experience. Young people are equipped as change agents, with gifts and learning styles our communities need now.The focus of our CDF Nashville team is nonviolent direct action organizing that prioritizes the voices and leadership of those hardest hit by the cradle to prison pipeline while working on dismantling this pipeline and redressing failures of public school systems, and countering the impact of zero tolerance policies and practices that result in targeting and criminalizing black and brown bodies, especially those in impoverished communities.TAPS will partner with CDF Freedom School Servant Leader Interns who are college students trained by the Children’s Defense Fund, who come from the same communities as the students.

Scarritt Bennett Center

Scarritt Bennett Center creates space where individuals and groups engage each other to achieve a more just world centered around the core values of:

• Empowerment of Women:  Enable women to strengthen their voices for self-advocacy, leadership, and action.
• Eradication of Racism: Challenge societal assumptions about power, domination, and violence that use race and ethnic differences to create inequality and inequity.
• Prophetic Justice: Work to realize a just society and promote activism on behalf of all those who live with injustice.
• Radical Hospitality: Provide a space for cultural expressions and a place at the table where all are included and affirmed that is grounded in Christian tradition,
• Sacred Rituals: Valuing sacred rituals as ways of honoring and celebrating cultural expressions.
• Spiritual Enrichment:  Rooted in an understanding that tending to the soul buoys and strengthens individual and communal renewal.
• Transformative Education: Build on the legacy of teaching and learning to empower people to be progressive catalysts in their communities.

Tennessee Alliance for Progress (TAP)

This organization is a community-based organization focused on social and racial justice. Its executive director, Daniel Joranko, has agreed to partner with TAPS on community projects and campaigns, especially with regard to mentoring the transition from liberal arts and seminary education to vocations in racial justice. Work with this program could also entail the Divinity School’s educational program at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution (Prison) and other initiatives engaged with reducing mass incarceration.

The Social Justice, Program, Vanderbilt Law School

With mentoring from our TAPS Advisory Board member, Daniel Sharfstein, the Law School’s Social Justice Program will work with the post-Masters fellows and program interns to develop and deepen their historical knowledge of movements for racial equality and social justice.  In particular, this collaboration will focus on how law and legal institutions can foster or, alternately, impede social change and how lawyers work with other activists. Understanding how social justice movements can engage the law and lawyers will make for more effective and dynamic scholar-activists.

Matthew Walker Comprehensive Health Center

MWCHC community health outreach programs offer TAPS partnerships in racial justice and healthcare that provide information about available services, while educating the community on health care access. These opportunities seek to increase innovative education for health fairs, community and government organizations, business associations, and schools. The ultimate goal is to improve health by closing the gap between resources and access. TAPS Advisory Board member, Matthew Walker III, will work to cultivate the relationship between the goals of MWCHC and the goals of TAPS.