Gemstones in the Sun

Gemstones in the Sun [GITS] is a coalition of individuals and organizations seeking to serve as an impetus for community healing and transformation.
We create an opportunity for People of Color (POC- indigenous people, descendants of enslaved, and the immigrants of color,) to recover from the effects of internalized oppression and build a cooperative and egalitarian economy in the United States

Gemstones In The Sun Freedom Circles serve as a reminder to POC to work together in solidarity to lessen greed and lack while striving to share abundantly and live life purposefully.
Gemstones In The Sun serve as a touchstone for regaining a sense of unlimited potential in each member’s eternal source of wisdom. As POC practice sharing with each other our stories and explore together what those wisdom sources are, we connect to a range of alternative and supplemental ways to create a sense of security in and a deepened understanding of what true freedom involves and why it can never be denied; a process that we call recovery. The essential truths shared by POC during the Freedom Circles process will embolden participants to make full use of their inherent (not assumed nor granted) freedom and power to the benefit of all.

● Gemstones in the Sun’s active support base would then be 5.7 million adult persons of color living in and across America. It is this number of persons of color that represent an approximation of Gemstones in the Sun’s current target market share today; and this representative number has risen since 2017-18; and is still escalating.

● Gemstones in the Sun is a first of its kind venture. It holds tremendous potential to help empower POC in the arenas of spirituality and (equitable) socio-economic growth through by building/sustaining innovative community development opportunities in ways that are not singularly reliant on municipal or traditional forms of commercial enterprise.

● The use of personal face-to-face and digital forms of communication via social media, Gemstones’ blog, and in person group meetings, is a broad platform upon which POC’ strength in community is shared more abundantly. Gemstones in form and in function advances POC self-empowerment.

● A bi product of our mission is that non-POC may become more fully aware of how they uphold the predominate forces of whiteness in American society, and why more inclusive forms of being relationship with POC need not be feared, but rather need be embraced.

In 2020, GITS recruited and on-boarded its Board of Directors who hosted its first organizational anniversary event in June and implemented its fall/winter fundraising campaign in December. That campaign was accompanied by a promotional video that GIST produced and shared with its supporters and prospective coalition partners. GIST offered its first digital workshop for Memphis Theological Seminary in May. We produced and posted our annual report(s) in six forigen languages. We launched our Freedom Circle program in the fall. GITS created a Movement Chaplaincy manual in preparation for that area of our programmatic work to begin next year. And, we continued to build on our strengths in the administrative areas of finance, in business development, community outreach, and for data management.

In 2021, Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and our commitment to follow public health advisories, our organizing work is primarily being undertaken by phone via conference calls, gatherings online. The instant that it is deemed safe and in our strategic interests to do so, our in-person community work will resume in earnest.

In 2021, GITS will primarily be focused on organizational development. Our governing Board intends to prioritize its capacity-building work around fundraising and policy-making. We will hire Movement Chaplains who will in turn recruit community members and facilitate Freedom Circles participants in reflection and praxis to unite spiritually anchored grassroots organizing efforts of action-oriented individuals, coalitions, and institutions.

In addition to using our Freedom Circles, we focus on doing grassroots organizing by requiring that each person in every level of the organization use our ladder of engagement and move management, and social media strategies to deepen and broaden relationships in and between POC communities. We conduct workshops, Blog, do fundraisers, and plan to do podcasts, and move through an intentional strategic planning process toward designing our GITS solidarity cooperative model. The model that is designed in partnership with GITS coalition members will be the basis for the work we will do in 2022 to begin to build a network of community-based enterprises that support each other by building supply chains and creating a non- hierarchical, non-exploitative and equitable set of economic relationships in community. Best cultural practices anchored in POC community values will be observed and directed by chapters and Freedom Circles originating in the DC metropolitan area and expanding to Mid-Atlantic states, and from there, eventually, across America for the benefit of all people.