Mission
Our mission is to equip neighbors in historically marginalized communities to realize their vision for their neighborhoods, and prepare institutions to respond effectively.
MISSION IN ACTION
equip neighbors in historically marginalized communities to realize their vision for their neighborhoods
We do this through our community engagement program called RVA Thrives.
RVA Thrives increases neighborhood leadership over decisions affecting Richmond’s Southside, putting neighbors at the center.
prepare institutions to respond effectively
We do this through our Consulting services.
Through two interconnected approaches, community-led engagement consulting (the Community Voice Blueprint) and workplace culture consulting, we guide organizations from surface-level outreach to genuine, community-centered decision-making built on trust, shared power, and lived practice.
*** Virginia Community Voice: Healing Justice & Community Power Building Center***
The need for healing justice is rooted in centuries of racialized violence and systemic oppression. South Richmond stands on land shaped by the brutal legacy of colonization, slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow segregation, redlining, food apartheid, and massive resistance to civil rights. Yet it is also a place of profound resilience: Native people resisted colonization here; enslaved people rebelled and escaped; civil rights leaders have fought — and continue to fight — for freedom and justice.
After nearly ten years of listening and organizing alongside this land’s predominantly Black and Brown neighbors, VACV has learned that fulfilling the promise of such community power depends on healing the accumulated historical trauma that limits imagination and obscures the future.
What We Are Building
The Healing Justice & Community Power Building Center will be a permanent, neighborhood-based sanctuary on Richmond's Southside — a community-designed space where holistic wellness and community organizing form a single, integrated practice. It is the first initiative of its kind in the Mid-Atlantic and Upper South: no other organization in the region has combined an explicit healing justice framework, food sovereignty, mental and physical health programming, and intentional power-building infrastructure into one community-led model.
