Every year since 2018, except 2020, Toni Bell, co-founder and executive director of the Columbus nonprofit Heritage Project, has hopped on a bus with a group of strangers from all over the country to lead them through the Heritage Project’s annual Civil Rights Heritage Tour of the South.
Throughout the week, as the group makes their way across cities like Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, and Atlanta, they gain an immersive, hands-on educational experience about the Civil Rights Movement of the '50s and '60s through speakers, museums and historical site visits.
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Soon enough, the group sheds that label — "strangers" — to grow into classmates for a week, learning from the tour stops, as well as each other.
“We bring diverse people on each of our tours, and in the context of what we’re exploring, they also get to talk about their lived experiences and their worldview and how knowing this history might inform their engagement or give different ideas about problem solving,” Bell said. “It's really joyful.”
Since the pandemic, Bell said, attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives have made these tours more important now than ever. With the growing demand, Heritage Project added the "Better Together" Leadership Development Tour to its programming last year.
It will be returning this September for its second run with a trip to Washington D.C.’s Chinese American Museum and National Museum of African-American History and Culture to open up conversations about mental health , diversity, wellness, culture and workplace dynamics.
Bell, drawing on her background as founder and owner of Phoenix Consulting Co., which offers tools for leadership and team development for businesses, expressed hope that the tours will help leaders learn in a novel setting that encourages critical thinking and an openness to everyone's backgrounds.
She said she feels it's especially important in a growing, globalizing city.
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“It’s one-to-one conversations, relationships," Bell said. "We expanded to Better Together to get more people the opportunity, especially for our leaders, to have conversations with people in a context that they don’t normally have the opportunity to, which could lead to building deeper, more robust relationships with the people in their workplaces."
elim@dispatch.com
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus nonprofit Heritage Project works to teach participants history
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