PISAB Communiversity
Communiversity is a program offered by The People’s Institute that invites community members, students, and scholars to learn, serve, and organize together.
While teaching at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Dr. Jim Dunn, Co-founder of The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), taught classes that included students and residents from the community. Dr. Dunn believed the brilliance of people in the community would only enhance the learning and teaching environment of the university.
Bringing community into the university was a value of his and continues to be an important principle of The People’s Institute and PISAB’s Communiversity. People historically left out, when organized, have always been those who change the course of history. We have seen this over time and it continues today.
The PISAB’s anti-racist Communiversity will provide ongoing development for people seeking to share lessons in anti-racist organizing. It will also be a place people can study, do research, and produce a knowledge base. Communiversity will provide a platform for people from a variety of occupations, sectors, professions and identities access to learning opportunities and training. This includes local community residents in NOLA and beyond. People from all over the country and the world committed to racial justice and anti-racist organizing would be welcomed to share and learn about addressing systemic racism in their communities, institutions and places of work and play. For over forty years, The People’s Institute has conducted the Undoing Racism Workshops®. At Communiversity, the workshop and more will be offered virtually, and in-person at the appropriate time.
Partnership with the TEP Center
The connection with the TEP Center is a historical partnership to link together with families, children and neighborhoods placed on the front lines to address structural racism in education and connect it to humanistic values, principles and anti-racist organizing.
On November 14, 1960, four six years old girls and their families were placed on the front lines to open school doors they were locked out of due to the racial segregation in education. This was six years after separate black and white schools were ruled unconstitutional in Brown vs Board of Education ruling. Many are familiar with Ruby Bridges and her legacy in integrating Frantz Elementary School in the lower ninth ward.
On that day, there were also three girls, Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost, enrolled in McDonogh No. 19 School at 5909 St. Claude Avenue, also in the lower ninth ward. By 9:25 am, the two public elementary schools in the Deep South were integrated. In 2009, Leona Tate established the Leona Tate Foundation for Change to help purchase McDonogh 19, the school she, along with Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne, integrated.
Today, she and her partners, Alembic Community Developers, are readying the historic landmark building to reopen in Summer 2021 as the Tate, Etienne, and Prevost (TEP) Center. The TEP Center is a mixed-use development dedicated to the history of New Orleans Public School Desegregation, Civil Rights, and Black Life. Her mission for The TEP Center is to create a safe space and community hub where the public can learn, support, and train for anti-racist organizing and social restorative justice.
The People’s Institute is the anchor partner with the Leona Tate Foundation and The TEP Center. The TEP Center will be the home of Communiversity. There, we will create a learning environment which provides a comprehensive approach to building humanistic and anti-racist leadership that is multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-generational.
History of PISAB Communiversity
The People’s Institute Communiversity builds on the organizing of The Jim Dunn Center. The Jim Dunn Center opened in 2000, to fulfill the dream of our co-founders: a leadership school for anti-racist grassroots organizers.
The Jim Dunn Center is/was designed by an Organizers’ Roundtable, a collective of over 200 anti-racist community organizers from throughout Southeast Louisiana. They meet regularly to share their experiences, sharpen their skills and deepen their analysis through forums, classes and cultural events, as well as provide technical support to one another and to their constituents.
The Jim Dunn Center for Anti-Racist Community Organizing has:
- Facilitated leadership forums, in partnership with the organizers, on housing and predatory lending, public school education reform, African American reparations, the prison-industrial complex, and internalized racial oppression.
- Hosted evenings of intergenerational cultural sharing, with community dancers, poets, artists, storytellers sharing their creativity.
- Supported anti-war, housing and other social justice mobilizations
- Collaborated on four research projects for African American history month
- Sponsored internship for high school and college-age anti-racist organizers in the U.S. and in South Africa