Alabama African- American Civil Rights Heritage Sites Consortium | Community-Driven Creative Placemaking
The Alabama African-American Civil Rights Heritage Sites Consortium is a grassroots network that seeks to protect, grow, and support the communities surrounding key sites of civil rights activism across Alabama. The innovative initiative, led by Priscilla Hancock-Cooper and incubated at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, dynamically blends movement building, the arts, community development, and historic preservation. Sherman Cultural Strategies was brought on by the World Monuments Fund to lead a year-long participatory research project to inform visioning and strategic planning for the Consortium, as well as to provide potential directions that stakeholders, funders, and partners could support. The final internal paper, created in collaboration with Dasjon S. Jordan and Deidra Montgomery, discussed precedent projects around the world and showcased Consortium members’ ideas as strategic opportunities for grassroots community economic development and cultural preservation.