by Jamoreelah Mullen
Could 23, 2025
The Gullah Geechee persons are descendants of enslaved West and Central Africans who reside alongside the southeastern coast of the U.S.
The Gullah Geechee Chamber of Commerce and the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at Harvard College’s Kennedy College of Authorities have partnered to create an financial restoration and growth program for the Gullah Geechee group.
By means of collaborative periods, group leaders, students, and supporters co-created a program rooted in financial stability and cultural preservation.
“We didn’t come to be included. We got here to combine what we’ve already constructed,” Marilyn Hemingway, President of the Gullah Geechee Chamber, mentioned.
The group proposed a five-year sustainability finances to help operations. The council will make sure that all initiatives align with the Gullah Geechee group’s cultural values, land safety efforts, and financial development. This initiative goals to attach Gullah Geechee individuals with enterprise leaders and international diasporic companions to develop and improve the economic system by means of know-how, cultural schooling, and tourism. This system seeks to show how traditionally marginalized communities can lead their financial restoration efforts.
“The Gullah Geechee hall is wealthy in tradition, delicacies, and unrealized capital. All through its existence, it has fed the world with rice, assets, freedom, and the fruit of enterprise and entrepreneurship,” Cornell William Brooks, director of the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at Harvard Kennedy College, mentioned in a press release.
“Within the 1700s, the hall was one of many wealthiest locations in America. There is no such thing as a higher time, no extra propitious a second than now to attain an unprecedented stage of financial growth,” Brooks famous.
The group will enter Part II of this system, which is able to embody growing funding initiatives, implementing methods, and prioritizing Gullah Geechee management and group.
Harvard has a historical past of supporting the preservation of Gullah Geechee tradition. In 2017, the college grew to become the primary Ivy League establishment to supply a Gullah language course—a creole dialect mixing English with West African languages. Linguist Sunn M’Cheaux, a local Gullah speaker from Charleston, S.C., teaches the course.
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