December on Freedom Road
Don’t miss our upcoming offerings!
We’re starting off 2025 with several new and exciting opportunites and it’s not too late to join in!
In this Newsletter
2025 Coaching Cohort
Faith-Rooted Organizing on NEW Terrain
Global Writers’ Group Annual Showcase
On the Freedom Road Podcast
Build a Better World
Global Writers Group
Fly
The Freedom Road Leadership Cohort is back for 2025!
In the midst of a conversation with a high-powered millennial influencer several years ago, Lisa discovered this person had never been mentored. Never. By anyone. Then the influencer explained that none of their friends, who are also powerful influencers, had ever been mentored either. How could this be?
Lisa realized that she’d had at least ten older adults who had spoken into her life over the past 40 years. They offered wisdom, care, strength, correction, protection and invaluable support at key moments of growth and transition. Being coached and coaching–that process of walking alongside others and offering hard-earned wisdom to help strengthen leadership capacity–are core values of Lisa’s and a key part of what we do here on Freedom Road.
So, Freedom Road launched our Coaching Cohorts in 2020. Since then, Lisa has walked alongside dozens of leaders helping them to connect with and move toward their own life-visions, identify and prepare for leadership challenges, navigate critical leadership decisions, and build their posse.
As we enter 2025, a time of profound national and global transition, leadership will matter more than ever. Freedom Road is launching its next Coaching Cohort with a particular emphasis on strengthening the capacity of leaders to be a force for justice on new terrain.
Coaching Cohort members will receive:
Personalized one-to-one online coaching sessions with Lisa Sharon Harper.
Cohort group online mentoring sessions to multiply wisdom and strengthen network capacity.
XTraining Cohort members who want more investment will also receive weekly leadership exercises and suggested readings. This extra investment will build leadership muscle, increase resilience, and help move your own work forward in challenging times.
And for our Frontline Cohort members, Lisa will also share monthly hot-takes on current events with key questions to consider as you engage the issues within your context.
The 2025 Leadership Cohort launches on February 11, 2025.
Registration deadline is January 15, 2026.
Pricing will be as follows:
Leadership Cohort: $199/mth
Leadership XTraining: Cohort PLUS Weekly leadership development activities and quick briefs on recommended books. Additional $49/mth
Frontline: Cohort AND Leadership XTraining PLUS Monthly current-events hot-take videos from Lisa Sharon Harper. Includes critical questions to consider concerning each hot-take issue. Additional $19/mth
Faith Rooted Organizing on NEW Terrain
Faith-Rooted Organizing draws from the roots of our traditions to help faith communities engage the larger movement for justice in our world. In this workshop, Lisa Sharon Harper will equip participants to analyze their community, strategize, build collaborative networks, and take action inspired by their faith!
As the U.S. transitions to the next presidential administration, there are a lot of reasons to throw up our hands and give up. But we cannot. Now is not the time for hopelessness. Now is the time for faith. Faith in God. Faith in the Jesus ethic. Faith in our power to actually be the body of Christ in our neighborhoods and cities and nation.
Now is the time to dig deep and grab hold of the same faith that took Fannie Lou Hamer from sharecropping in Mississippi to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. We need the faith that sustained young John Lewis from the Freedom Rides to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We need the faith of Margaretta Forten and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth. We need thick faith right now.
But it is not enough for us to learn from those who have gone before us in the U.S. We are entering new terrain. For that we must also turn to our brothers and sisters whose faith-soaked actions won their fights against authoritarian governments.
It’s time to get ready.
Join us for a FREE webinar Jan 13, 7-8pm ET | LIVE: Introduction to “Faith-Rooted Organizing on NEW Terrain” training.
And then Join us for this 6-week LIVE Webinar Series, “Faith-Rooted Organizing Training on NEW Terrain”
Mondays, Feb 3-Mar 10, 7-9pm ET
(Recordings available for registered participants).
Global Writers’ Group Annual Showcase
Join the writers of the Freedom Road Global Writers’ Group for our annual showcase as we explore what resilience looks like together.
On the Freedom Road Podcast
The Gaza Call
Dear Fellow Disciples of Jesus,
We are a community of Christians from around the world who are writing to you with heavy hearts. From our countries, we are watching with horror as a crisis has unfolded in Palestine/Israel. Since October 7, 2023, 1,139 Israeli Jews and more than 37,000 Palestinian Gazans have been killed. In the West Bank, more than 500 Palestinians have been killed, including many women and children. We condemn all of it. And yet, we see again and again how Christian leaders, theologians, institutions, and churches around the world have not only failed to call out their governments, which support Israel’s military, but also have been incapable of calling Israel out for what is clearly the utter devastation of Gaza and the dramatic loss of life there. Followers of Jesus in Palestine, the United Nations, and the International Court of Justice have identified Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank as ethnic cleansing and a plausible genocide. The Pope named Israel’s assault on Gaza as “terrorism.” We are appealing to you, imploring you to ask how God sees this litany of destruction and death, and what Christ requires of you…
Read the rest and add your name to the open letter here!
Build a Better World: A Learning Community from Freedom Road
Have you read one of Lisa Sharon Harper’s books? Or one of the books from our Global Writers’ Group authors? Have you been a part of one of Freedom Road’s Webinars either live or purchased one on demand? We have just launched a learning community on Facebook for anyone who wants to chat with like-minded people about the material they’ve been reading or watching.
Join us today and we will grow together to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly into a better world!
Join the Facebook Group
To make things easier in these difficult times where everything seems to be more expensive, we have lowered our individual pricing on all our courses to make them accessible to more people. And don’t forget there’s a couple of free offerings to get you started as well! Check out our institute page and the course archive now.
Rather read a book? Check out The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can be Made Right or Fortune: How Race Broke my Family and the World… and How to Repair it All both by Lisa Sharon Harper.
Or check out the list of books written in our Global Writers’ Group here.
Fly
Download Fly now on Apple or Amazon Music or stream on Spotify and take it with you wherever you go!
Global Writer’s Group
Since April of 2020 as the world closed down, the Global Writer’s Group has been meeting via zoom every Saturday, with time off only for Christmas and New Years. Early in our time together, Lisa Sharon Harper charged the group with the task of “writing a new world into existence” and over time we have truly seen this in action. We have taken on the task of changing the world, and of course what changed first was ourselves. We as a group have become better writers over this time, but also better people, finding true community in the sacred sharing of ourselves with each other and the world.
We accept members on a rolling basis: it’s never too late to join the community. Prepare to find your life changed for the better as you sharpen your writing skills and prepare to bring your words to the world.
Collectively, we have published six books, have several writers who’ve recently become agented and/or are under contract for upcoming books, and many, many journal articles over the past three years with several more books in the works.
The Narrative Gap, as coined by Lisa Sharon Harper, is the distance between the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, including how we got here and what it will take to make things right. In our world today, competing narratives vie for our loyalty, dividing society and the church, therefore making justice impossible. Our mission is help communities shrink the narrative gap, by identifying core issues and building community capacity so they might work toward common solutions for a just world. Here on the Freedom Road Substack, we can converse together on ways to shrink that narrative gap and help ensure everyones’ stories are told.
Connect
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