On Martin Luther King Jr. day, I spent the afternoon and evening in Baptist Town. I had visited before, but it was a group of public policy students from Harvard’s Kennedy school, that introduced me to residents in a new way. These students (and their predecessors – the student shown in this video first visited in 2009) have succeeded in community engagement where many others fail because they listen, and because they do not view the people of Baptist Town as a group that knows or cares any less than they do. They have built trust, hope and capacity in the years that they have been working here in Greenwood, and it is this base that will allow the initiatives that I am working on to move forward. I am grateful to them for their encouragement, ideas, and allowing me to be carried forward by their efforts.

Read more about their work here.