AMONG: Learning Goals and Objectives

Foster Structural, Systemic Change

This program helps congregations foster effective and healthy structural systemic change.

• Congregations will better understand systemic change and gain capacity to identify methods that create lasting anti-racist change in systems.
• Congregations will work to identify factors that consistently lead them astray while attempting to change their systems.
• Congregations will work to integrate change concepts into targeted areas of congregational life.

Dismantle Racial/Colonial Systems of Oppression

This program helps congregations identify how racism and white supremacy culture operate in and reinforce oppressive systems.

• Congregations will complete congregational assessments in order to identify policies and behaviors that foster white supremacy culture.
• Based on what is learned, congregations will have capacity to adapt thinking and behaviors, as well as congregational systems, toward alignment with anti-racist values and goals.

Center Marginalized Communities

This program helps congregations imagine new ways of doing and being, centering needs and voices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, while moving the whole congregation toward radical inclusion and multicultural transformation.

• Congregations will have access to inspirational materials that remind them of the beauty, possibility, and creativity inherent in multicultural communities. 
• Congregations will have access to examples from other congregations and communities doing innovative ministries, trying radical experiments, and living into their values of radical inclusion, centering, and welcome.
• Regardless of their racial demographics, congregations will be asked to re-envision their ministries with the needs and voices of BIPOC at the center. 

Make Focused Change in Specific Areas of Congregational Life

This program asks congregations to explore possibilities for change by discerning one area of congregational life, to focus their time, energy, and expertise on, making strategic shifts in that area that is most primed for anti-racist change and where change efforts are most likely to make an impact. 

• Congregations will not be expected to completely rebuild this area of their congregational life, but instead, along with their coach, to try making a series of shifts (or experiments) that move them towards their long-term vision. 

Reinforce the Spiritual Nature of the Work

This program will focus on spiritual practices and resources that inform, nurture, deepen, ground, and complexify the change work and call us back to our religious values.

• The program will include resources that engage spirit as well as mind, body as well as soul, reflecting the diversity of learning styles, perspectives, and strengths found in our human family and on the congregation's Among Team. 
• While engaging theory and innovative practices will be at the core of the work, participants should expect exercises and assignments to engage the mind, body, emotional systems, and social relationships.  
• Congregations will better understand and develop practices that honor the presence of multiple realities and truths that exist in our multicultural/multi-racial communities.