April 11, 2024

The Raleigh-based North Carolina Black Alliance will hold a training April 29-30 in Charlotte for Carolinas activists looking for ways to inform their communities about local issues and to hold their local leaders accountable.

Sessions have been scheduled at 9:30 a.m.-4 p.m. on April 29 and 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m April 30 at Belmont Regional Center, 700 Parkwood Ave., Charlotte. Participants will be present at the April 30 Sarah Stevenson Tuesday Forum. Register here. Agenda here.

The North Carolna Black Alliance is a Raleigh-based nonprofit with a number of affiliated organizations under its umbrella. Its website says the Alliance “is an intergovernmental network of African American legislators, county commissioners, school board members, and municipal elected officials centered by a commitment to ambitiously address broad issues of inequality and fairness.”

The Black Alliance is led by Marcus Bass, who remembers attending what was then known as the Tuesday Morning Breakfast Forum as he grew up in a Charlotte neighborhood off Beatties Ford Road. He began exploring the possibilities of an event like the April 29-30 training with three Forum facilitators in September 2021. The purpose was not to grow the Charlotte Forum, but to inspire local leaders elsewhere to learn from the Charlotte Forum’s history and methods and to have the opportunity to talk directly with Forum leaders about strategies that might help them to organize their hometown communities for change.