Our mission is to make democracy real.
The Jamestown Project is a diverse action-oriented think tank of new leaders who reach across boundaries and generations to make democracy real. Founded and operated primarily by people of color and women, The Jamestown Project consists of scholars, activists, and communities who use five broad strategies to achieve our mission: generating new ideas; promoting meaningful public conversations and engagement; cultivating new leaders; formulating political strategy and public policy; and using cutting-edge communications techniques that reach a broad public.
Our four core values are:
- Participation. We encourage, inspire and support maximum citizen participation and engagement in the democratic process.
- Shared learning. We support communities sharing knowledge and forming deep and abiding bonds with one another as a way to strengthen their connections and as a foundation for community change.
- Humility. We value and encourage a willingness to question how well democracy is working, to acknowledge what is not working, and to learn from and with others what can be done to strengthen it.
- Respect for each other and the common good. We believe that a healthy democracy recognizes the value of people with different histories and opinions engaged in conversation about our way of life. This conversation requires respect for others and an affirmation of the diversity that is one of the greatest virtues of our nation. We believe in the value of openness to others even as we affirm our own individuality. This value also informs our commitment to encourage communities on the margins of American society and in the world to work together, with us, to strengthen democracy for all.
The Jamestown Project's History
Promise & Problems
The Jamestown Project was born out of a series of conversations among a group of ten Morehouse College students who began thinking about how to craft an institutional response to the host of structural and behavioral problems and issues that affected black folk. The friends strongly believed that mere academic theorization would not meaningfully impact the lives of black folk in America; just as grassroots efforts - unguided by robust theorization and study - were equally ineffectual.
Many degrees, careers, and marriages later, the friends held a weekend retreat at the Historic Alex Haley Farm in Clinton, Tennessee to develop a blueprint of an institution designed to address issues of race and democracy in the United States, laying out, in broad strokes, what such an organization would look like. The working group of friends expanded and asked Stephanie Robinson to bring the collective vision to life. Robinson further expanded the working group, which became the founding membership of The Jamestown Project.
We call ourselves The Jamestown Project because we put the Jamestown colony, the first permanent settlement in the English colonies that became the United States, at the beginning of the story of American democracy. Doing this serves as a constant reminder of the complexity that has come to mar and mark our history, namely the coexistence of the ideals of democracy and freedom with the scourges of slavery and colonialism. The name reminds us that the promise and the problems of America have been intertwined from the very beginning, and that race has always been a subtext of the American story. However, we believe that we can make America's promise overcome its problems, as surely as, we replaced slavery with freedom.
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