Voices United

My commitment to eradicating our world of intolerance began at birth; adopted by a white family, I was always the only Black person in every environment. Bearing witness to the world’s hate, inequity, and injustice, I was driven to fight for justice. In high school, I traveled to the Soviet Union, and together with 60 Latvian and American children, sang, danced, and expressed our hope for a more peaceful world. Inspired, I returned to the US and founded Voices United, an organization designed to promote cross cultural understanding and social justice through the arts. Weekly for 6 months at a time, over 100 youth from all cultures and disparate neighborhoods of Miami worked together to write musical productions about the issues that were most important to them. Central to this, I created a process that ensured the development of soft and hard skills with a focus on community building. For more than 30 years, I have worked locally, nationally, and globally to generate tolerance, acceptance and understanding, facilitate innovation, creativity, and inspiration for generations of change makers. My primary goals are to unify people of varying backgrounds and give them the support and tools they need to change the world.

My commitment to eradicating our world of intolerance began at birth; adopted by a white family, I was always the only Black person in every environment. Bearing witness to the world’s hate, inequity, and injustice, I was driven to fight for justice. In high school, I traveled to the Soviet Union, and together with 60 Latvian and American children, sang, danced, and expressed our hope for a more peaceful world. Inspired, I returned to the US and founded Voices United, an organization designed to promote cross cultural understanding and social justice through the arts. Weekly for 6 months at a time, over 100 youth from all cultures and disparate neighborhoods of Miami worked together to write musical productions about the issues that were most important to them. Central to this, I created a process that ensured the development of soft and hard skills with a focus on community building. For more than 30 years, I have worked locally, nationally, and globally to generate tolerance, acceptance and understanding, facilitate innovation, creativity, and inspiration for generations of change makers. My primary goals are to unify people of varying backgrounds and give them the support and tools they need to change the world. 

Voices United addresses racism through creative expression, cultivating a place where people can come together, take action and make change. Racism, costing the US $2 trillion annually, is in the fabric of the world's institutions via colonization, genocide, and ongoing systemic oppression, affecting us all, prohibiting our progress as a global community. Avoidance, lack of skills, lack of understanding of the true histories of BIPOC peoples and undervaluing Black lives, keeps us from dismantling racism. We utilize the arts to connect people, discover common ground and develop leadership and team-building skills. Our Process includes innovative games geared toward building community and self-discovery providing the material for our original productions. We’re committed to supporting  change-makers doing important work. Through retreats, residencies, workshops and resources designed to nourish and support, we’re deepening our work and reinforcing the support and training for those in the field. Our work in Lesotho, inspired something exciting, it’s magical authenticity is a powerful reminder of our past. We saw “Ubuntu”(I am because we are) in action and wanted to share it with people. As we grow, building the Village, is our next step in supporting youth, artists and change-makers, inspiring leaders and bring Ubuntu to communities globally.

Voices United has seen remarkable success reducing racism by offering meaningful creative experiences for people of diverse cultures to learn to understand and respect each other, build authentic cross-cultural relationships, offer a holistic platform for self-expression that shifts participants perspectives about racism, generating thousands of people committed to social justice. We now seek to amplify and embellish this work by borrowing from Africa, bringing hundreds of thousands of years of historical memory of community building and Ubuntu back out to the world through cultural exchange. Remembering where we come from and how we are all interconnected is best accomplished in the mother land where these values and philosophies surround you with a deep sense of belonging and connection. The core idea of Voices United Village is to connect community leaders and artists to traditional community building practices, allowing them to better understand what community is, enabling them to infuse those techniques into their work in their communities. Voices United Village centers deep engagement, meaningful connection and local community development with a focus on amplifying and supporting BIPOC leaders of all ages, artist and change makers from around the world, allowing them to bring these learnings back to their home communities.

Currently, our world has a problem with intolerance that takes many forms, keeping our communities isolated and at odds with each other. This bigotry deepens our disparities, limiting struggling communities in fear for the lives of their children. Racism permeates the fabric of our nations through colonization and oppression. We live in structures and systems that perpetuate and uphold intolerance put in place years ago, making us feel powerless and unsure how to move forward. We are becoming more divided and silo-ed. We no longer remember how to contribute to community that is about the whole. Western systems have left behind the traditional ways of life that sustained communities successfully for 100’s of thousands of years. Materialism and individualism have replaced Ubuntu and we must discover a way back together. Voices United has traditionally strengthened communities, developed a profound understanding and respect among participants, and taking that work to Lesotho amplifies and magnifies what we can accomplish. Voices United Village allows us to connect people to our ancestral knowledge, grasp of community, true sense of humanness and Ubuntu and bring that knowledge back out into the world, injecting new life, practices, and inspiration into the work of change happening globally.