Beloved Me, Beloved We Initiative Receives Grant
In July 2020, the Godly Play Board President, Mary Hunter Maxwell, made a commitment that the Godly Play Foundation would engage in a process to examine how our organization “reflects the structures of oppression that plague our nation” and “confront the realities of racism that exist even in our most sacred spaces.” Since that time the Godly Play Foundation has been in a process of listening and learning, and identifying our priorities for moving toward anti-racism. An anti-racism task force began working in December 2020 to make recommendations to the Board regarding anti-racism in the organization. The seventeen members of the anti-racism task force spent five months evaluating various aspects of the Godly Play Foundation including training, curriculum and materials, and organizational culture. Thanks to this inspiring group, we developed our Beloved Me, Beloved We initiative to define our work going forward.
Our goal:
To delightfully and prophetically inspire brave spaces so that every child who comes close to Godly Play, encounters a felt sense of their inherent worth and dignity as one uniquely and fully created in God’s image (Beloved Me) and co-creates a way of being and inspiring inclusive communities which celebrate the diversity of God and God’s creation (Beloved We).
The Beloved Me, Beloved We initiative has four priorities:
Audit our storytelling and training curricula, materials, and processes for implicit bias
Increase the diversity and inclusivity of our leadership
Engage our leaders in an educational process regarding anti-bias, anti-racist education
Reimagine our funding model to increase equity and accessibility.
In addition we will convene a Beloved Me, Beloved We Advisory committee which meets regularly for ongoing assessment and accountability.
We are excited to announce that the Godly Play Foundation recently partnered with one of our member Dioceses - the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts - to apply for a "Becoming Beloved Community" Grant from The Episcopal Church. The purpose of the grant was to help us "kick-start" the audit of our curricula for implicit bias. While we didn't receive full funding, we received enough to get going on this important work. It will start with a three-day retreat in New Hampshire with a diverse team to look at fifteen stories - the stories in Volume 3 of "The Complete Guide to Godly Play." We are pulling together a team of eight people plus two staff - Heather Ingersoll, our Executive Director, and Cheryl Minor, the Director of the Center for the Theology of Childhood.
Stayed tuned for regular updates!
