Their work includes intergenerational cultural celebration, welcoming and inclusive spiritual practices, comprehensive civic action, and the promotion of ancient healing modalities. Liberty co-creates, building on the wisdom of community, from toddlers to elders, from the University of Minnesota, the Northside Achievement Zone, and 16 community partners. Liberty co-creates Homeplaces based on the tradition of African Americans creating safe community spaces for healing.
As a Homeplace, Liberty is able to adaptively respond to crisis and expand or shift programming to meet the ongoing needs of community. Their North Minneapolis community has a legacy of strength and resiliance, concurrently suffering from a lethal absence of hope, inequity, and violence. North Minneapolis has a history of racism and generational poverty caused by redlining, disinvestment, and over-surveillance, which has created a climate of cross generational racialized trauma and intersectional racialized oppression.
Liberty’s community initiatives are the Northside Healing Space (NHS) which serves over 2,000 individuals each year and the 21st Century Academy which serves over 250 children and their families. The 21st Century Academy helps prepare K-12 Northside scholars to be fearless global ambassadors of radical hope and power, eliminate generational poverty, and promote community and environmental healing.
NHS is open seven days a week and serves the Northside community and all who suffer from the impact of racialized trauma, generational poverty, and exploitation, including those who are victims of the commercial sex trade. The strategies we use to combat racism, oppression, and exploitation are rest, remembrance, resistance, and revival.
Liberty offers high-impact historical trauma recognition and healing centered engagement through active listening, mindfulness, story sharing, resiliency, perseverance, and embracing cultural healing techniques. Offerings at NHS include: Organic gardening, community crafting, planetary health, yoga, survivor healing circles, birthing justice and maternal health, mental health support, support for food and housing, financial education and support, acupuncture, entrepreneurship, Sankofa, resource referrals – and space for our partners to offer programming that supports community healing.
NHS is an outgrowth of work stemming from two streams of participatory research in the early 2000s. Liberty listened and provided support to survivors and people involved in the sex trade, while a community-based research team, now at the University of Minnesota, was doing participatory action research in Minneapolis with survivor-leaders. From these intersectional efforts NHS was co-created and launched in 2007.
Liberty Community Church and Rev. Dr.’s Galloway are the driving force behind Liberty’s work to eliminate prejudice and racism in society; demonstrate a commitment to pluralism and inclusivity; and develop unique and thought-provoking co-created strategies to combat racism.
With their community and partners Liberty is co-creating restorative and radical spaces and places of healing; Liberty is building the beloved community.