Charlotte Racial Justice Consortium Meets At Central Piedmont
On April 19, 2023, the Charlotte Racial Justice Consortium (CRJC) met at Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC) for a culminating event of presentations from all five institutions in the consortium.
The CRJC is a partnership between CPCC, Johnson C. Smith University, Johnson and Wales University’s Charlotte Campus, Queens University of Charlotte and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
The consortium works to create a Charlotte community that understands its history of race and racism, embraces a more comprehensive narrative on race, eliminates a hierarchy of human value and develops faculty, staff and student leaders who advocate across the five campuses and community for truth, justice, racial healing and systemic transformation.
THE CRJC is in its third year. Each year, it has its student fellows research an issue and come up with a plan to address it in their community. This years’ theme was voting rights and advocacy.
“This year what we decided to do was move students toward a community impact project,” said Dr. Melvin Herring, director of the master of Social Work program and CRJC advisor at JCSU. “The thought was that students would develop strategies that would last through the 2023 presidential election. The strategies would engage each community in participating in their civic duties. Subsequent fellows will build on this plan through 2024.”