Beloved Community Initiative for Racial Justice, Healing, and Reconciliation

The Beloved Community Initiative offers educational programs on the legacy of slavery and Iowa’s role in the Underground Railroad, the civil rights movement in Iowa, the history of the indigenous tribes of Iowa, the Doctrine of Discovery, and the nature of racism and racial bias today.

The Beloved Community Initiative is collecting resources to help churches and individuals uncover their history and tell their stories. 

The Beloved Community Initiative has large and small space available for local artists, writers, and musicians as well as space for theatre, film screenings, concerts, art and other cultural events that expand our historical and cultural understandings of race. 

Check our calendar to read more about upcoming or recent events.

As the Beloved Community Initiative  gets underway, we plan to meet regularly for interfaith prayer, meditation, and worship to find inspiration and support for the work of justice, healing, and reconciliation. We also intend to offer special times of prayer and celebration for the entire community.

We offer retreats that explore ways for people to reflect on and engage in spiritual practices of repentance and explore a spirituality of restorative justice.

The Beloved Community Initiative is creating litanies and liturgies focused on justice, healing, and reconciliation to be shared with the wider faith community.

Check our calendar to read more about upcoming or recent events.

The Beloved Community Initiative offers training opportunities for youth and adults from across the state to learn to recognize and respond to bias and racism (our own and others’), to build equitable relationships, to communicate effectively across difference, and to develop strategies to challenge organizational barriers to inclusion and facilitate change.

A youth camp will be offered each summer that will enhance youth leadership skills and will specifically focus on training and skill-building for youth. 

We also facilitate learning across the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa and support growth opportunities such as workshops and leadership training.

The Beloved Community Initiative is developing Pilgrimage experiences that explore Underground Railroad sites in Iowa, that visit the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota, and environmental justice sites in Northwest Iowa.

We also are able to coordinate pilgrimage opportunities that highlight reconciliation: Episcopal Relief & Development Ghana Reconciliation Pilgrimage, the Jonathan Daniels Pilgrimage in Alabama, the Diocese of Atlanta’s Lynching Pilgrimage, the Trail of Souls in the Diocese of Maryland.

We make our space available for public story-telling around race. We invite people to share stories about the current and ongoing realities and dynamics of race and racism in Iowa, and hope to help develop and support  an inter-generational writing & literacy project. 

Check our calendar to read more about upcoming or recent events.

The Beloved Community Initiative partners with organizations and institutions that share our commitment to racial justice, healing, and reconciliation.

Partner groups are welcome to use the multi-purpose space at the Initiative for meetings and can arrange through the Initiative to host large events in the ballroom space.

We publicly support and work to offer justice initiatives that will improve the lives and lived experiences of people of color in Iowa.

Check our calendar to read more about upcoming or recent events.