Highlander is pleased to announce a $10,000 New Donor Match. Three friends of Highlander have stretched beyond their normal giving and pooled their resources to establish a new donor match. Dollar for dollar, they will match every gift from a new donor between now and December 28th.up to $10,000.

Perhaps you have been meaning to donate to Highlander and just never got around to it. NOW is the time! Your generosity doubles and is much appreciated!

If you are already a much appreciated current donor, we ask that you please take one more step beyond your own giving and help us meet this challenge. Perhaps there is someone in your networks or circles that you've been meaning to talk to about Highlander. Now is the time to ask them to help to sustain this longstanding, cutting edge beacon of progressive organizing.

Online giving is made easy with the Donate Now button on our website.

Highlander is excited to introduce our new Development & Communications Team. Please join us in welcoming Jardana Peacock and Marquez Rhyne by making a tax-deductible contribution to Highlander today, knowing that your generosity helps sustain Highlander’s critical efforts to continuing supporting grassroots people and communities working for change in the South and Appalachia.

Marquez Rhyne has worked as a nonprofit administrator serving as the Managing Director of Jump-Start Performance Co. (San Antonio, TX), The Carpetbag Theatre (Knoxville, TN), and Operations/Education Director for the Bijou Theatre (Knoxville, TN.) In these roles, Rhyne held responsibility for grant writing, cultivation of individual donors, and oversight of resource development including planning, acquisition, evaluation, financial tracking and reporting. He served in multiple capacities including Board Chair for the Executive Committee of Alternate ROOTS, a regional organization of cultural workers in the U.S. South committed in social and economic justice and protection of the natural environment. Rhyne has served as an independent consultant for diversity training, workforce development, and cultural facilitation for such organizations as Seton Homes and St. PJ’s Children’s Homes in San Antonio, TX; Brushy Fork Institute in Berea, KY; Tennessee Department of Transportation; Leadership Knoxville; and the Highlander Center prior to joining the staff.

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Highlander Research and Education Center has worked for 77 years in the southeastern United States to promote progressive social change. As the demographics of our region dramatically shifted due to immigration, we began to work more intensively with immigrant and refugee communities and to build cross-racial, multicultural alliances as part of our ongoing work with people of color and low income constituencies.

Highlander is a residential popular education center working with groups on economic justice and democratic participation. We are located on a 186 acre farm in the mountains of East Tennessee near Knoxville. All staff have individual and organizational responsibilities, and organization is based on a democratic participatory staff structure model.

We are seeking a staff person on the Education Team to be part of the overall team work and to be the lead staff on Highlander's multilingual work. Responsibilities involve building our own capacity for interpretation and translation (at least bi-lingual in English-Spanish) and building multilingual capacity in the region. We have a new interpreter training workshop module that has been well-tested and is now available for use.

Position is based at Highlander in New Market, TN, about 20 miles from Knoxville. Applicants who are interested in this position must be able to live in the area and be prepared to make a three year commitment. Position involves travel.

Learn more about the position and how to apply, here

Highlander is honored to announce The Greensboro Justice Fund Fellowships at the Highlander Center beginning in 2010. This new fellowship program will support grassroots organizing in the South through annual intensive fellowships with 5 southern activists in the memory of the 5 community organizers who were killed by the Klan and Nazis in Greensboro, North Carolina 30 years ago - Sandra Smith, César Cauce, Michael Nathan, William Sampson and James Waller.

The Greensboro Justice Fund was created by family and survivors of the massacre five years later, using an award from a civil case that found the city of Greensboro and members of the Klan complicit in the murders. Monies from the Fund have been used to support grassroots organizations in the South for the last twenty-five years.

GJF commemorated the 30th anniversary of the murders earlier this month with a week long series of educational and cultural activities, concluding with a reception which announced the creation of two new Greensboro Justice Fund Institutes for Southern Organizers. GJF is transferring its assets to the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro to establish an annual legacy internship, and to the Highlander Center to establish the 5 fellowships to carry forward the work of training organizers in the name of the Greensboro Justice Fund. Highlander is honored to be chosen to carry this work forward, and honored to do so with the Beloved Community Center.

To read Highlander Director Pam McMichael's comments at the reception, click here.

In October, Highlander Director Pam McMichael was a featured panelist on a program,“What Now – 1932: The Highlander Center Opens its Doors” as part of the radio series Action Speaks, Under-appreciated Dates that Changed America. Hosted by Marc Levitt, Action Speaks looks at contemporary issues through the lens of history and is filmed in the heart of downtown Providence’s arts and cultural district and broadcast across the country.

You can hear the program through the Action Speaks website here.

McMichael was joined on the panel by Heather Cronk, the Chief Operating Officer at the New Organizing Institute, in Washington DC; Mary Kay Harris, the Lead Organizer for the Providence organization Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), and by extension a player in the national social justice alliance Right to the City; and Nicholas V. Longo, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Public and Community Service Studies and Director of the Global Studies Program at Providence College; author of the book Why Community Matters: Connecting Education with Civic Life.

Highlander welcomes six new and talented members to the Board of Directors.

Henry Allen is a long time social justice activist in the Boston area and has been involved in philanthropic activities for decades, currently as the Executive Director of the Discount Foundation. He directed a popular education school for people involved in community and workplace organizing, where he first came to know Highlander.

Kara Keeling is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Art and of African American Studies in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She moved to Los Angeles from North Carolina where she taught at UNC and was active in the community. She is a former board member of SONG, Southerners on New Ground.

Diana Marie Lee was the vice-president of the National Community Development Institute, and now, as a consultant, she continues her focus on transformational philanthropy and building capacity in social justice organizations and low-wage communities. Her early work focused on health care disparities and community health.

Leslie Lowe is the Energy & Environment Program Director of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) in New York City, addressing among other issues, mountaintop removal. Prior to joining ICCR, she was Executive Director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYCEJA) and was chair of the Board of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation.

Jessica Norwood is the founder of Emerging ChangeMakers Network, a network focused developing community leaders for community, state, and national needs. Jessica raises money for the network, leads workshop and training, and provides coaching to participants and local groups. Jessica is experienced in campaigns and elections and also leads a consulting firm, Norwood & Associates.

Andrea Arias Soto is a native of Colombia, South America, now living Asheville, NC where she works with the Center for Participatory Change, there since 2004. She is a founding member of the Centro Comunitario Hispano Americano in Brevard, and of COLA, the Coalición de Organizaciones Latino Americanas. Andrea has been active in Highlander's multilingual work.

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