The Campaign for Love & Forgiveness
2007 - 2008

WTVI is gearing up for year two of this three-year national initiative and has already seen Beverly Dorn-Steele, director of education and outreach, attend campaign training in Michigan with other outreach coordinators and facilitators from select PBS stations. WTVI is one of only six PBS stations to have been awarded community-engagement grants.


Beverly Dorn-Steele, WTVI director of education
and outreach services (bottom left), joins other
PBS representatives awarded the Love and
Forgiveness Campaign grant.

Beverly was joined in Michigan in August by Brenda Anderson, who served as lead facilitator for the station’s conversations in year one. Anderson was selected by The Fetzer Institute to share her background and experiences with others who will be facilitating group meetings and conversations.

Josephine Washington, who took part in the station’s 2006 - 2007 campaign conversations and activities, says the experience helped transform her life. She in fact was selected to be a candidate for spokesperson for the national campaign.

The Afro-American Cultural Center (AACC) has joined with WTVI in the second year of the campaign. The AACC Roundtable Fellows held a production in July entitled “If the Red Bench Could Speak”. The production is designed to help facilitate continuing dialogue for the campaign that has a main focus of exploring how love and forgiveness can touch and impact the community.

The AACC Roundtable Fellows will participate in the campaign as Red Bench Ambassadors and will exhibit their art form, such as poetry, storytelling and dancing, to portray the power of love and forgiveness.

The symbol of the campaign is the Red Bench of Love and WTVI partnered in August with Mothers of Murdered Offspring (MOM-O) for a memorial service, at Charlotte’s Frazier Park, in honor of a female missionary slain at a Charlotte apartment complex. The station donated the use of its Red Bench for those in attendance to share a moment of understanding and forgiveness.

                  
During an August memorial service, the parents of Jin Joo Bryne (pictured on the left)
used WTVI’s Red Bench of Love to reflect on their daughter's life and to offer
forgiveness to the man convicted of taking her life.

The Campaign for Love & Forgiveness combines public television programming, community activities and events, and on-line discussions to encourage contemplation and conversation about how love and forgiveness can effect meaningful change in individuals and society.

The overall campaign is supported by three documentaries and the first year focused on love, with the airing of The Mystery of Love that explored love in marriage, family, and community. The next documentary will be The Power of Forgiveness which combines character-driven stories about the most dramatic transgressions imaginable with those that seem more commonplace. It also will examine the role that forgiveness can play in alleviating anger and grief, and the physical, mental, and spiritual benefits that come with forgiveness.

Start or Join a Conversation

Do your daily conversations revolve around politics, family, work, television shows, music? What would it be like to talk with others interested in exploring experiences and expressions of love and forgiveness? What can we learn by sharing these closely held stories? Can we deepen and broaden our understanding of love and forgiveness and how it threads its way throughout all aspects of our lives, by examining these experiences with others? The Campaign for Love & Forgiveness can help you do just that.

Our partners
Stratford Richardson YMCA Youth Council
Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County
WTVI Community Engagement Committee
Women Inter-cultural Exchange
Community Building Initiative

You can share your written "stories of love" as so many others have done with The Charlotte Observer. Visit the Observer's Web site to view the stories.


Mail your personal "stories of love and forgiveness" to:

Beverly Dorn-Steele
WTVI
Director of Education and Outreach
Attn: Campaign for Love & Forgiveness
3242 Commonwealth Avenue
Charlotte, NC 28205

or E-mail them to:
bds@wtvi.org

Major funding provided by:
The Fetzer Institute as part of The Campaign for Love & Forgiveness