Tending to the Spirit as Strategy
Background
Social change organizers can easily fall into the trap of relentless reaction — juggling crises, confronting hostility, and navigating divisions. As a result, they fight for democracy and justice as their own spiritual wells run dry. Cut off from the sources of fortitude, imagination, and meaning that could sustain them for the long haul, burnout becomes inevitable.
The Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, knows from experience that feeding the spirit is crucial for grassroots activism. Its reason for being is to bring people together to gain knowledge, expand their ideas, and nurture the spirit-centered grit needed to move from imagining justice to practicing it.
“Cultural organizing is where the spirit shows up — it helps people bridge the gap between the reality and the vision, and that leap is itself a spiritual practice. When people start to act out the future they deserve, that’s the leap of faith we’re helping them take,” says the Rev. Allyn Maxfield-Steele, co-executive director.
Reaching throughout Appalachia and the South, Highlander is focused on developing leaders and organizations that work for justice, equality, and sustainability, strengthening their local efforts and joining them with others to build broad movements for change. It’s a special place where leaders, networks, and movements come together to interact, build friendships, craft joint strategy, and develop ways to advance a multiracial, intergenerational movement for change. Art, music, food, ritual, and storytelling are merged throughout the experience as powerful ways to inspire grassroots solidarity, build momentum, and revitalize people’s spirits for the work ahead.
“Highlander invites people – especially people across the U.S. South and Appalachia – to recall collectively the promises of justice, the memory of dignity, and the sacredness of land and community,” says Maxfield-Steele. As a region that has inspired, birthed and sustained liberation struggles for centuries, “there is no viable organizing strategy in the South that does not include engaging with spirituality,” she emphasizes.
Begun in 1932 as the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., the organization evolved from an educational institution for rural, cash-poor residents into an internationally renowned incubator for cross-racial solidarity, movement strategy, analysis, and deep cultural work. From the labor movements of the 1930s and 40s to the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s and into today’s struggles, Highlander’s workshops and programs have brought people together across issues, identities, and geographies to work for spirit-centered transformative social change.
Initiative Overview
Today, Highlander’s work encompasses many arenas for democratic participation and economic justice, with a particular focus on cultural, multiracial, and intersectional strategies to build a world beyond authoritarianism.
Highlander’s physical campus and reclaimed land add depth to the experience. Its newly reacquired original homeplace ties its current work to its labor movement and civil rights legacy of working with notable leaders, including Rosa Parks, Septima Poinsette Clark, Congressman John Lewis, Ambassador Andrew Young, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., among countless others. For the many who visit both sites that Highlander stewards, it’s a pilgrimage and a lasting transformation.
In both place and purpose, Highlander is a unique training ground and refuge, a place for tending the minds, hearts, and spiritual fortitude of frontliners doing the radical work of making justice a reality.
Key Components
Leads education workshops for leaders and justice-oriented activists from seminaries, congregations, and grassroots organizations from a constellation of frontline struggles.
Our commitment to Radical Hospitality allows us to host gatherings and convenings that blend spiritual renewal, cultural exchange, and organizing strategy, most notably the annual Homecoming that brings hundreds of organizers together on Highlander’s campus.
Partners with theological institutions, including the Candler School of Theology (Emory University), to design coursework that supports the formation of spirit-rooted leaders.
Provides fiscal sponsorship, technical support, and funding redistribution through collaborative initiatives such as the Southern Power Fund, which has redistributed over $29 million to fourteen frontline groups across the South and Puerto Rico.
Offers place-based programming in East Tennessee while maintaining a regional, national, and international reach, serving as a spiritual and educational home for thousands of alumni, including leaders in the Poor People’s Campaign, Movement for Black Lives, Solidaire, the Southern Movement Assembly, and SURJ.
Engages in cultural organizing that weaves together art, music, food, ritual, and storytelling to inspire action and build deeper movement infrastructure.
Impact
“When people gather and start to share what they’ve inherited versus what they deserve, that’s when they do ambitious things together. They’ve touched it before — in dreams, in visions, in liminal moments. Highlander helps stretch those moments into something sustained.”
– Rev. Allyn Maxfield-Steele, co-executive director
75,000+ people reached annually through workshops, fellowships, convenings, and training, with dozens of requests each month from seminaries, congregations, and grassroots groups.
In 2024 alone, more than 5,000 organizers trained, 765 participants in facilitated events, and 40 organizations held onsite strategy sessions.
Cultural Organizing trainings empowered 3,000+ participants in cultural organizing training with tools including de-escalation, principled struggle, and community safety.
142 organizers now using Highlander’s cultural organizing curriculum in their communities.
Through the Southern Power Fund (co-anchored by Highlander), over $29M redistributed to 500+ frontline groups in 13 Southern states and Puerto Rico since 2020.
Conclusion
How Spirituality Makes This Work Different
Justice. Equality. Dignity. Compassion. Human wholeness. Respect for the interconnectedness of all living things. Highlander has long understood that social change organizers are fueled by values of an expansive spiritual vision of a world made new. Powerful yet vulnerable at the same time, those values need mindful support and renewal to stay strong.
Everything Highlander does aims to improve the spirit-fed health of changemakers, doing what’s needed to ensure those on the frontlines of change stay strong and ready for the hard and necessary work they do.
Return to the Spiritual Solutions Library.