About Us

The Welcome Table Collaborative sources its origins from many special people and places. Most centrally, it was born in Mississippi, a haunted and hallowed state, site of some of the most horrific racist violence in the nation's history. But Mississippi was also the home of Mae Bertha Carter, C.C. Bryant, Medgar Evers, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and many other unsung but heroic people who both refused to accept white supremacy and division and who also built bridges across racial lines to create a beloved community.

The WTC was born as well in the stories of Mississippi communities like McComb, Philadelphia, Sumner--places where community leaders have faced their troubled histories head on, through authentic stories that create genuine human connection, deeper than the programming that creates false hierarchies of human value. It has grown and deepend in work in over twenty-five states across the country, most recently in a three-year initiative to support the healing, reckoning, and repair of enslaved and enslaver descendants of Arlington House, most well-known as the plantation/slave-labor camp of Robert E. Lee. This Arlington House Descendants Family Circle, in its first inclusive family reunion in over 160 years, in April 2023, offered a vision of a re-imagined understanding of kinship and interdependence which marks a path forward in polarized times. We are all more inter-related and inter-connected than we know or appreciate and we all share a desire to imagine and create a new world where our children are free, happy, supported, and secure.

The organizations that are a part of the WTC all seek to foster healing and equity and use the power of story, the cultivation of empathy, the telling of hard truths, and the repair of harm in service to a better world. We wed the latest in advancements in neuroscience, psychology, and history with the deep and ancient wisdom of indigenous cultures who have shaped all of us.

Together, we have created a bricolage of the most effective approaches and tested them in collaboration with community leaders from all walks of life, in professional organizations from a variety of sectors, with all age groups. Forged in those experiences, we have decades of collective practical knowledge about how theoretical and philosophical ideas work practically, effectively, and sustainably in local communities and in organizations across sectors. Our “secret sauce,” then are the leaders with whom we have worked, who show us what is helpful and how to best serve them as they move forward.

e Welcome Table Collaborative sources its origins from many special people and places. Most centrally, it was born in Mississippi, a haunted and hallowed state, site of some of the most horrific racist violence in the nation's history. But Mississippi was also the home of Mae Bertha Carter, C.C. Bryant, Medgar Evers, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and many other unsung but heroic people who both refused to accept white supremacy and division and who also built bridges across racial lines to create a beloved community.

Come join us!