Project Curate

Project Curate is formed to help train individuals and communities understand and respond to underlying systemic issues related to urban living. This is done through group interaction, education,workshops and seminars.Experts in the field of Sociology,Religion,and Race, Contextual Theology and Human Development teach, train and develop both content and process related to creating unity, invoking social change and creating a collaborative network across racial, ethnic and economic boundaries. This includes building partnerships with other community organizations. Our core work is around curricula development and building intellectual / social community toward justice, equity and community and civic engagement goals. Our work ultimately seeks to enact an emancipatory ethos and practice of critical public engagement that moves people into spaces where they can dismantle barriers that tend to exist along the lines of class, race, sex, gender, and political orientation. Following CURRICULA & COHORTS: Our creative curricula bring together racially, socioeconomically, and religiously diverse communities to learn competencies in solidarity and form networks of transformation across the city. PUBLIC DIALOGUES: Throughout the year, Curate organizes and hosts events around pressing social issues to engage with different publics toward building broader and deeper coalitions. MULTIMEDIA: Curate also makes interventions through blogs and podcasts, and soon through an online digital publication, all of which delves deeper into issues that link religion and race to the ongoing work of struggling for human dignity intersectional justice. In 2021 activities included development of an internet based application to support the programs. CONSULTING & TRAINING: Project Curate provides additional, in-depth contextual analysis, strategic design, and leadership training for churches, civic organizations, ecclesial councils and leaders, foundations, and academic partners. COMMUNITY & CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: We have a number of social justice advocates and community organizers on our team who work on issues of inequity, including those related to immigration, education, housing, and race. Throughout the year, we share strategies on how you can get involved at the local level or participate in Curates social incubator groups that engage in various collaborative, immersive, and relational community service projects that seek to take action on several issues.

ImagiNoir/BLMHTX, a collective of academic researchers, activists, artists, religious leaders, and community organizers that aims to educate, empower, and build coalition in order to strengthen black communities and address issues that impact black lives is the city of Houston. The core pillars of the collective are critical dialogue, creative imagination, and coalition building. They leverage each of these pillars along with unique skills, talents, and passions of the collective members to create spaces that promote robust consideration of justice issues, imaginative blueprints for alternative, equity based community structures as wells as innovative, practical solutions to meet the needs of black Houstonians. In paticular, they seek to cultivate models of black leadership and community engagement that reject narrow approaches to movement building premised upon a solitary leader or spokesperson in favor of models grounded in interdependence, non-hieracrchy, and adaptaion.