The Future of CCT
by Gary Redding, CCT Chair
The Concerned Citizens of Tillery (CCT) remains a great organization with a talented staff of organizers and a compassionate vision because it operates at its fullest potential by empowering people to do their best work. This has not been an easy mission due to the organization facing challenges and obstacles in recent times common to other not-for-profits, such as limited funding and resources. Despite this reality, CCT still perseveres and is optimistic about the future. While maintaining its historic commitments to social justice, economic justice, and environmental justice in Tillery, NC and beyond, CCT will endeavor to embrace the present ever-changing world of new ideas, education, technology, social networking, democratic ideals, and community organizing.
CCT is committed to forging partnerships locally, nationally, and globally to create a contemporary Black Renaissance with new attitudes and goals, a fresh awareness of ourselves as individuals and as a group, and interests in pride in blackness and education. The new emerging leaders of CCT must be a part of a marathon struggle, with active, informed participation, and a readiness to integrate their knowledge and life experiences learned elsewhere into CCT’s grassroots enterprise. We must welcome opportunities for change and a consciousness of ourselves, where prejudice, brutality, and the killing of black males by police are no long acceptable and inevitable treatment. Protest and outrage are proven strategies, but protest and outrage without a plan is an exercise in perpetual futility. We must educate our young people and others to become lawyers and constitutional experts, financial and investment experts, writers, mathematicians and scientists, and new-age teachers and nutritionists. We must be marching to a new awareness of the world, new perspectives, and horizons, with our goal being to meet the millennium halfway.
CCT’s leaders, members, and member organizations are ripe to create this revolutionary change in Tillery, NC and beyond because they have the dynamic elements of dedication, vitality, foresight, holistic ideals, and love of Mother Nature and its inhabitants. An eighth-member organization is on the way that will be a public interest law firm that is dedicated to providing affordable and adequate legal representation to low-income and other residents in eastern North Carolina. CCT’s future begins with each of us individually and will be sustained by our active engagement as a group of knowledgeable elders and energetic youth and young adults.
Note: This reflection on the future of the Concerned Citizens of Tillery was intended for the 35th Anniversary Book, but was not included due to an editing error. Look for it in subsequent editions.
