Black Belt Community Foundation

Levitt AMP Selma MuSIC SERIES

The Black Belt Community Foundation (BBCF) is announcing the 2025 Levitt AMP Selma Music Series’ impressive lineup of artists to perform at Selma’s Riverfront Amphitheater from June 21st to October 25^th! Families, friends, and neighbors are invited to bring blankets, lawn chairs, and coolers to the amphitheater lawn as the community gets the chance to experience the power of free live music brings our community together.

Sponsored in part by the Mortimer & Mimi Levitt Foundation, a social impact funder supporting nonprofits nationwide at the intersection of music, public space, and community building, the Levitt AMP Music Series injects new life into underused public spaces through free, outdoor concerts across the nation. This is the third year that BBCF has received support from the Levitt Foundation and has been able to present this concert series through vital partnerships across the Selma and Dallas County community including the City of Selma and the Selma-Dallas County Chamber of Commerce.

The Levitt AMP Selma Music Series is supported in part by the Mortimer & Mimi Levitt Foundation, which partners with changemakers and nonprofits across the country to activate underused outdoor spaces through the power of free, live music—bringing people together, fostering belonging, and invigorating community life. Presenting high-caliber talent and a broad array of music genres and cultural programming, Levitt concerts are welcoming and inclusive destinations where people of all ages and backgrounds come together.

In 2024, the national Levitt network of music venues and concert sites is presenting 650+ free concerts in 45 towns and cities, with audiences over 750,000. In addition to supporting free concerts, the Levitt Foundation is dedicated to advancing equitable music ecosystems through research and partnerships. www.levitt.org

Musician wearing hat stands on stage at microphone during Concert series.

A man and woman sitting in lawn chairs smiling during the concert.

Older man with white beard and hat on holds up canvas bag during concert series.

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.

The INNOVATION CENTER

In response to needs identified through the Dallas County Area Study, TRHT Selma is working to launch an innovation center to serve as a hub for transformation in Selma, Alabama. The 2020-2021 Study was led by Dr. Sekou Franklin of Middle Tennessee State University and designed to measure resource availability and attitudes related to financial mobility across Dallas County. The innovation center will offer residents and tourists alike the chance to envision, support, and experience an economically trans- forming Selma. Located directly adjacent to the Ancient Africa, Slavery, and Civil War Museum in downtown Selma, the innovation center will house two merchandise showrooms, a community classroom space, and co-working facilities.

The innovation center will exemplify our theory of change by tackling the work of changing hearts and minds for the better as we increase access to resources related to improving material conditions across our community. Transformation Coaches will specialize in walking step-by-step with members of the innovation center to define and create a success plan as well as help address challenges to success as they occur.

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Our Five Main Focal Areas:

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.
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.
Separation/segregation: how to dismantle and transform the laws, policies, structures, habits and biases that created and sustain separation.
Economy: how to remove the structured inequality and barriers to economic opportunities, and develop solutions that will create a more equitable society.
Law: how the community recognizes the historical significance our system of law has played in perpetuating the hierarchy of human value.

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).