This week I attended two gatherings that offer much hope for our future. The first was the annual Fall meeting of the National Council of Elders at Haley Farms in Tennessee. I was reminded how much we need the combination of place and memory to think about the future.

The Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) cares for Haley Farms. In 1994 CDF became responsible for what had once been the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alex Haley. It is now a place of gathering where thousands of people have come to walk the hills, study in the library, or reflect in the chapel to renew and expand their thinking. It is filled with the spirit of struggle for liberation.

The main farmhouse is now a lodge that welcomes people home. Surrounded by a wide porch offering rocking chairs that bear the names of people now gone, Haley reminds us the longing for freedom persists in this land.

The Council was fortunate to spend time with a group of women from across the south gathering to talk about abolishing prisons and supporting other women as they return to communities. They recognized that the present system has created a cradle-to-prison pipeline that depends on locking people up as a source of its own profit and power.

One strategy for creating more liberated lives is the use of restorative justice. We learned of the efforts in Nashville to bring restorative justice practices not only to the schools, but to the courts, prosecutors, and jails.  We learned of the use of art to open imagination and consciousness through a wonderful project where students were given two items, a school desk, and a prison uniform, to create an artistic statement. Displaying these creations in front of the courthouse, police, judges, lawyers, prosecutors, and jurors had to confront images of chained bodies, money pouring out of pockets, and handcuffed bibles as young people expressed how their souls were being sold and destroyed.  In simple yet powerful ways, new images become a basis for change, opening new ways to see our world.

We also heard much about the developments of Project South which has spent more than three decades supporting movement work and advancing the practice of democracy.  Through popular education, collective action, and imaginative programs, Project South has been evolving the work of People’s Movement Assemblies as a way to create new forms of governance. Recognizing that we must find ways to not only care for one another but to make decisions about our lives and communities, Project South has been pushing the edges of our thinking about local control in the face of a hostile state.

After returning briefly to Detroit, I went to the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership in Kalamazoo. There a small group of activists rooted in the Midwest had gathered to think about the importance of our region in creating new ways of living and being.

It was a rich few days, stimulated by a visit to the Sweet Water Foundation in Chicago.

Sweet Water practices Regenerative Placemaking, creating “safe and inspiring spaces for healthy, intergenerational communities that transform the ecology” of neighborhoods. Blending urban agriculture, art, and education, Sweet Water is a vivid example that we already know some of the pathways to a better future.

This year as many of us gather to celebrate the ties of family and friends, we should hold fast to those places and memories that sustain us as we imagine the world we want and so need to create.