Castleberry is a town of 486 people in south-central Alabama where strawberries grow big and sweet. It is where life took Alesia Thomas, a Black military veteran, when her best friend needed her help, and it is where the Indiana native intends to grow old.

The community known as Chestnut lies about 50 miles away, in the northern part of Monroe County on the state’s southwest coastal plain. It’s where Lasonja Kennedy’s people are from, on her mother’s side. And it is where Kennedy, after years doing mission work as far away as Senegal, is working toward change.

Thomas and Kennedy don’t know each other. Neither considers herself an advocate in the political sense of the word, but both have been helping people for as long as they can remember. Now they are seeking ways, any ways at all, they can make life better for their families and communities.

It is the clarity of their separate missions that has led both women to be chosen as inaugural fellows of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Alabama Advocacy Institute. They are among 15 Alabamians selected out of 48 applicants to participate in a series of education seminars created by the SPLC to guide local leaders in advocating for and advancing issues critical to their communities. Chosen for their desire to elevate the work they have been able to accomplish on their own, the fellows arrive at the doors of the institute eager to build their already-prodigious skills in leveraging individual and collective power to fuel deeply needed change.

“These are people who have been organizing and working on initiatives in their communities, with agendas driven by the issues that are directly impacting people, and they want training so that they are better equipped to address those issues they are passionate about,” said Tafeni English-Relf, director of the SPLC’s Alabama state office. “What sets the Advocacy Institute apart is that projects and the ideals will be driven by the participants. We’re not coming in saying you have to do it this way. We are really giving them an opportunity to gain training, to gain information and awareness around developing an advocacy network. It is a place to give them a voice and to be inspired by the skills that they already have.”

Sharing skills and knowledge

Supporting the work of people like Thomas and Kennedy is at the very heart of the collaborative model the SPLC has been developing over the past several years as the 52-year-old racial justice organization strengthens its ties with communities across the Deep South. By listening to and learning from the people who are pushing their communities to become vibrant, flourishing places of opportunity for all – while sharing skills and knowledge with those on the frontlines of change – the SPLC advances the cause of justice on which it was founded.

“If we are to truly build a multiracial, inclusive democracy, it will take all of us harnessing our unique expertise, experience and power as we work toward change,” said Margaret Huang, the president and CEO of the SPLC. “Our team at the Alabama Advocacy Institute developed a terrific training curriculum designed to help Alabamians do just that, while also connecting participants with generations of civil rights work and teaching the necessary foundations for community organizing. With a historic election coming up, the institute is an exciting way to center communities in advocacy work and partner with people of color to build voting power in the Deep South.”

The institute launched on June 20 with two days of orientation sessions designed to ground the new fellows in an understanding of the foundations of racism in the U.S., on the work of advocates for racial justice over the decades, and on the structural barriers to change, including housing policy, a punitive justice system and how social policy on issues such as education and health care has been wielded against people of color. The fellows also shared their own experiences through journaling and conversations.

Over nine weeks of learning sessions spread out over several months, the fellows will receive training on the foundations of community advocacy – including organizing, data collection, and how to convey their personal stories to legislators and potential funders to drive change.

Communications experts from the SPLC will help teach messaging strategy. Successful advocates from a variety of organizations will teach leadership development, building coalitions and resolving conflicts. Documentarians will share how to create visual storytelling. A Hispanic organizer in Alabama will speak on deepening the relationship between Black and Brown communities. Elected officials from throughout the state will participate in a panel discussion on the importance of representation that represents the makeup of a community.

The sessions will conclude with presentations from each of the fellows on a project they plan in their community. Three participants will be selected, and their advocacy plan will be supported with stipends ranging from $10,000 to $20,000.

Advocating for basic needs

Chestnut, where some of Kennedy’s relatives still reside, takes its name from a giant chestnut tree that once provided shade at the crossroads where the settlement sprang up in the early 1800s.

Today, there is little shade in Chestnut. There is also – shockingly – no public utility to provide water. The approximately 300 people who live in the community either obtain water from personal wells which are too expensive to purchase and maintain for most residents, or they purchase cases of water from stores. In some cases, residents fill up jugs from someone else’s home or an outdoor hydrant.

“I see that as unimaginable in 2024,” Kennedy said. “With some of the service work I did in Africa, I worked with groups who lived without water, or without resources, period. To have to deal with that, is just unacceptable in the United States, in this day and time. Access to a clean, reliable water source is a basic human right.”

Since moving back to Monroe County, Kennedy has been working with community members and seeking help from county officials to resolve the issue. On several occasions, Kennedy and community members petitioned the Monroe County Commission to address the matter. Currently, Chestnut and its residents – who pay property taxes to the county – remain without access to a reliable water source.

“I just see it as a problem,” Kennedy said. “And I’m wondering why other people don’t see it as a problem.”

Kennedy said she is hoping the institute will help her attain the tools to best advocate for the community on a broader level.

“I feel like we’re close, and I’m hoping that maybe learning the resources that this institute has, or could provide, whether that’s legal assistance or access to additional resources, can help the community get water,” Kennedy said. “I see this as another opportunity to give back to the community and help where I can, where I am.” 

‘Stronger community’

For Thomas, participation in the institute is a way to supercharge the sort of caring, innovative thinking and action that comes to her naturally. Now 57, she moved to Alabama in 2019 from Tampa, Florida, when her best friend, who was born and raised in Castleberry, suffered a stroke and wanted to move back. Thomas dropped everything at the news. Jonnie Davis, after all, had been there for Thomas two decades earlier. They had become friends at church, and when Thomas descended into addiction to cocaine, Davis was there for her, helping her through her recovery. She was there, too, when Thomas endured a tough pregnancy and then severe postpartum depression.

“There just has never been a time that she has not been there in my life, so it was automatic,” Thomas said. “When they said, Jonnie wants you to come, to see about her, I was on the next flight out.”

Thomas had always liked the little town in Alabama that Davis was from. She and her family had visited over the years. After she cared for Davis through the depths of her illness and back to health, she decided it would be a great place to retire. Soon she had convinced not only her husband but her brother and sisters. Today, they all live in Castleberry in mobile homes they set up, family-compound style, on a 5-acre plot they bought together.

But much as she loved Castleberry from the first, Thomas was distressed at the lack of financial literacy she saw around her. Having raised herself out of poverty through human resources work with several Fortune 500 companies, she felt sorely the lack of generational wealth in her own family and in those she saw around her.

So, when some friends asked her to volunteer at the local community center, Thomas took up the challenge. She started offering computer classes to local children, then financial literacy classes. She came up with games to teach the kids how to manage money. Soon, she was applying for and getting a grant from a local Dollar General store to run a summer reading program, then another to expand her financial literacy workshop.

Realizing that internet access was spotty, not only at the community center but in many of the most rural parts of the county, Thomas began petitioning government officials to improve it. She hasn’t succeeded yet, but she has begun to get the attention of elected leaders, she said.

Thomas is hoping to win funding from the SPLC to buy an old school bus she could park outside the community center and transform into a fun, creative learning center to engage children in earning, budgeting and investing their money. Inspired by a similar project in Atlanta, Thomas envisions the bus would be outfitted with a mock ATM and bank, a stock market and a store, encouraging hands-on learning and fostering skills in financial decision-making. 

Driving her efforts, Thomas said, is the hope that by understanding how money works, her community can build the generational wealth she sees that many Black communities lack, as well as the community growth she hopes will create “a whole different Castleberry.”

“It’s important to me to be able to pass something down to my children,” Thomas said. “My parents did not. They probably just, you know, were trying to survive. There were nine of us, so there wasn’t much left. At first, I wanted to build this for my family, but now it’s about building a stronger community.”

Picture at top: Alabama Advocacy Institute fellows gather with SPLC staff members on the second day of the institute. Fifteen fellows were chosen to participate in learning sessions designed to guide them in advocating for issues critical to their communities. (Credit: Hillary Hudson)