NC Civility Summit

ECU’s department of Intercultural Affairs will host the 6th Annual NC Civility Summit themed “Building Peace After Conflict: Lessons Learned from ECU’s Global Partners.” The 2021 summit will occur over the course of several dates as a series featuring community leaders from Pine Ridge, SD, Parkland, FL, Berlin, Germany, and Belfast, Northern Ireland sharing their experiences of extremism in their home communities and engage with participants on topics such as radicalization and polarization, peace-building, democracy and dialogue. This series is offered in partnership with ECU’s fair trade global learning partner, Amizade.

Session Dates and Times

March 24, March 31, April 7, April 14; 12-1:30pm.

• Session 1 (3/24): Belfast, Northern Ireland – Liam Stone, John Hoey, and Stephen Hughes (St. Peters Youth Club)
• Session 2 (3/31): Berlin, Germany – Dr. Matthias Hass (Wannsee Conference)
• Session 3 (4/7): Pine Ridge Reservation – Milton Bianas, Leah Mutz, and Keller Allen (Pine Ridge Agricultural Initiative)
• Session 4 (4/14): Parkland, FL – Matt Deitsch (March for Our Lives) and others TBA

Participants are encouraged to participate in all four sessions, although this is optional. An optional social action / service-learning project will be offered at the end of the series.

Recordings

Program History

The NC Civility Summit is aimed at promoting understanding and positive change on East Carolina University’s campus and beyond. The 2016 Summit featured a keynote by Opal Tometi, executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Ndaba Mandela, grandson of the late Nelson Mandela and co-founder and co-chairman of the Africa Rising Foundation opened the 2017 event. The 2018 Summit hosted keynote speaker will be Dr. Jennifer Arnold, physician, cancer survivor, and star of “The Little Couple”. The 2019 Summit hosted two keynote speakers: Ken Nwadike, founder of the Free Hugs Project, and Dr. Bettina Love, professor and author of We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Lastly, the 2020 event featured inspirational speaker and former professional baseball player Chris Singleton, whose mother, Sharonda Coleman Singleton, was murdered along with eight other victims at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, SC.

The Civility Summit provides opportunities for student, faculty, staff, and community member attendees from the state and region to engage in conversations about civility and how it intersects with topics such as activism, race, politics, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and global affairs. The overarching goal of the event is for these conversations to fuel participants’ desires to make changes in themselves which would aid their work in becoming positive change agents.

Summit goals and learning outcomes include:

• promoting democratic values within our campus community
• encouraging unity in the face of public divisiveness
• honoring active citizenship as a daily practice and inspirational goal
• encouraging students to creatively engage in constructive conflict
• promoting ‘steady, loving confrontation’ (MLK’s definition of nonviolence) to promote a more just and equitable world