Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØ

The Center for African and African American Studies (The CAAAS |ÌýThe CAAAS) is committed to advancing scholarship, art, and public engagement grounded in and growing out of the histories, cultures, and struggles of Africa, African Americans, and the African diaspora. Central to this mission is a renewed commitment to what Martin Luther King called the Beloved Community: a moral philosophy and way of living together anchored in justice, animated by love, and sustained by the shared responsibility we bear for one another’s dignity and destiny. The Beloved Community Program within the CAAAS seeks to translate this worldview and value system into continuous ethical, educational, cultural, and sociopolitical practice. Essentially, this program is the social outreach, community engagement, and public education arm of the Center for African and African American Studies, and its primary aim is to build a bridge from the Boulder campus to the Boulder community and beyond. The CAAAS has amassed many community partners over the years, and the Beloved Community Program serves as an entry point, incubator, and anchor for community members and social organizations that would like to serve as ambassadors and embassies for the new humanity, new community, and new society the CAAAS seeks to bring into being.

Ìý

For Dr. King, the Beloved Community was not merely a future ideal but an urgently needed and immediate ethical practice of loving and living together grounded in nonviolence, economic justice, and the dignity of every human being. He clearly understood that racism, poverty, and militarism were bound together, each feeding the other, and that none could be undone without confronting them all. While King fought for freedom in an era of racial segregation, his vision extends powerfully into the present, calling for a contemporary society that goes beyond formal integration toward substantive justice—the creation of a society predicated on compassion and cooperation instead of callousness and conflict. The CAAAS Beloved Community Program embraces this expanded understanding, recognizing that proximity without equity, and integration without structural transformation falls short of King’s dream. The Beloved Community Program is designed as a space for insurgent inclusivity, moral courage, and progressive politics. It seeks to build a community where all people are welcomed, respected, and protected, regardless of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, nationality, or ability. The program places particular emphasis on centering those who have been most marginalized by historical and contemporary interlocking systems of oppression, affirming King’s insistence that a society’s moral worth is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable members.

Ìý

In practice, the Beloved Community Program is enacted and operates through public lectures, podcasts, critical dialogues, cultural events, workshops, teach-ins, and collective action that connect research and creative work to the real world, community-building, and the stubborn belief that a better world is possible. These events and programs address critical issues such as racial injustice, gender oppression, economic inequality, state violence, mass incarceration, access to education and health care, mental health and wellness, environmental racism, and climate change. By creating spaces for honest conversation and collective learning, the Beloved Community Program fosters the kind of critical consciousness and public education agenda that King believed was essential for democratic renewal. Equally important, the Beloved Community Program insists that ethical action must walk alongside intellectual rigor and daring artistic expression. It moves from the faith that education, culture, and art can either imprison the spirit or help set it free, depending on how they are used. Beloved Community members are called beyond awareness into engagement, shaping lives marked by service, solidarity, and nonviolent resistance to injustice. In this way, the program honors King’s bold belief and enduring truth that love is not a soft sentiment but a powerful practice and transformative force, audaciously asking us to commit to both self-transformation and social transformation.

Ìý

The Beloved Community Program also situates local and national struggles within a global context. Drawing on King’s internationalism and his opposition to colonialism and war, the program affirms solidarity with oppressed peoples around the world. It recognizes that the pursuit of justice in the United States is inseparable from global efforts to challenge economic exploitation, political domination, and environmental destruction. Ultimately, the Beloved Community Program within the CAAAS is an invitation to imagine and enact a different kind of democracy. It calls on students, faculty, artists, and community members to work together to create a multiracial, multicultural, and multireligious society grounded, not in fear or competition, but in cooperation, compassion, and shared humanity. In doing so, the program seeks to carry forward Martin Luther King’s lifework, legacy, and lingering challenge: to choose community over chaos and to build, through intentional and loving action, a world that reflects the rich and replete beauty of humanity.

Ìý

The relationship between the Center for African and African American Studies (The CAAAS |ÌýThe CAAAS) and community organizations is mutually beneficial. The Center is eager to provide resources, connections, and opportunities to all community partners with the understanding that each partner will reciprocate by committing to: (1) being an active member of the Beloved Community ecosystem locally, nationally, and internationally; (2) encouraging community members to get involved in the Center for African and African American Studies events and programs; (3) sharing best practices and other resources in order to build the Beloved Community locally, nationally, and internationally; (4) investing time and resources to ongoing efforts to create the Beloved Community within and between the CAAAS and its community partners; and (5) sharing Beloved Community Program-specific yearly progress with the Center as a contribution to the CAAAS annual report.Ìý

Ìý