Growth Fund

Selma

Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation

TRHT is a comprehensive, national and community-based process to plan for and bring about transformational and sustainable change, and to address the historic and contemporary effects of racism. A primary focus of TRHT is jettisoning the deeply held, and often unconscious, beliefs that undergird racism: that a person’s or group’s inferiority or superiority is based on physical characteristics, race, ethnicity or place of origin. This belief has  fueled racism and conscious and unconscious bias throughout American culture.

 

TRHT Selma was initiated in Selma in May 2017 with the Black Belt Community Foundation (BBCF) established as a TRHT grantee by funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. BBCF has joined forces with the Selma Center for Nonviolence as their programmatic place partner to implement the THRT process for Selma and Dallas County.

Dallas County Area Study (DCAS). was conducted between December 2019 and May 2021. It entails a 500-person survey with 300 respondents residing in Selma-Dallas County and the remaining 200 people drawn from more than a dozen smaller, rural counties. The project is part of the Truth, Racial Healing, & Transformation Selma (TRHT Selma) initiative sponsored by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and implemented by the Black Belt Community Foundation (BBCF) and the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth & Reconciliation (SCNTR).

Our Five Main Focal Areas:

  1. Narrative change: how to create a more complete and accurate narrative that will help people understand how racial hierarchy has been embedded in our society.
  2. Racial healing & relationship-building: how all of us can heal from the wounds of the past and build mutually respectful relationships across racial and ethnic lines.
  3. Separation/segregation: how to dismantle and transform the laws, policies, structures, habits and biases that created and sustain separation.
  4. Economy: how to remove the structured inequality and barriers to economic opportunities, and develop solutions that will create a more equitable society.
  5. Law: how the community recognizes the historical significance our system of law has played in perpetuating the hierarchy of human value.

IN THE NEWS

  • Original article printed in The Montgomery Advertiser.   Alabama carries a deep history of racial violence and division, especially in Selma and other places that were central to the Civil Rights Movement....

  • The associate professor of political science and international relations analyzes the results of a study of race relations in the Black Belt of Alabama. Listen Here...

  • SELMA, AL – January 11, 2022:  Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Selma (TRHT Selma) a programmatic partnership of the Black Belt Community Foundation (BBCF) and the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth & Reconciliation (SCNTR) announces a series of public service and healing events to honor......

  • The W.K. Kellogg Foundation will grant $24 million in support funding for its racial healing initiative in communities across the country, including in Battle Creek. It is the latest investment by the Battle Creek-based foundation to oversee parts of its Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation initiative, which launched......

BBCF is proud to work with the Selma Center for Nonviolence as our TRHT programmatic place partner.