It takes a great deal of work for a group of strangers to achieve the safety of true community. Our folks know it is safe to share their heart. People in our group know they will be listened to and accepted for themselves. Years and years of pent-up frustration and hurt and guilt and grief have already been dealt with. Vulnerability is commonplace for us and flows in our community. We do not practice the rugged individualism that has become the hallmark of America.

We understand that most human attempts to heal and convert prevent community. For us, community is the answer. We have created a truly safe place, where these defenses and resistances are no longer necessary, and the thrust toward health is liberated. This safe place has unleashed the natural tendency for us to heal and convert ourselves.
We have learned that it is within our power to listen to each other, to accept each other, and that our relationships are therapeutic. So we focus not so much on healing as on making our relationships a safe place where each of us is likely to heal themselves.

Paradoxically, we became healing and converting only after we learned to stop trying to heal and convert.

Our community is a safe place precisely because we are not attempting to heal or convert each other, to fix each other, to change each other. Instead, we accept each other as we are. You are free to be you. And being so free, you are free to discard defenses, masks, disguises; free to seek your own psychological and spiritual health; free to become your whole and holy self. We are a community who has learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to “rejoice together, mourn together,” and to “delight in each other, to make each others’ conditions our own.” We call it Wakanda Washtenaw. It is the product of the Kwanzaa Project, where the theme of Raising Royalty has been fleshed out.

Even more amazing is seeing this in all 50 school sites. The Parent Village and the Youth Council have been responsible for the rapid spread of this positive virus. We have learned to work together to solve our own problems.

The six metrics of the Raising Royalty theme are so present, they have made community building attractive and possible. The six metrics are the objectives: Mission, Love, Stewardship, Wisdom, Community, and Discipline.