We are a collective of community organizers, educators and media artists in North Carolina that shares a belief in the causes of social justice. Our team consists of an advisory council and a planning team. The planning team is the Heirs Project leadership and make decisions about our work through dialogue and consensus. Independent consultants are occasionally contracted for specific pieces of work.

Cynthia Brown is the principal consultant of The Sojourner Group, a business she founded to help non-profit groups strengthen their leadership and address their organizational development issues. She also is a grassroots organizer and leader, former Durham City Councilwoman and a 2002 candidate for the United States Senate. A native of Reidsville, North Carolina, she has an undergraduate degree in political science from Bennett College for Women and a Master of Public Affairs degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. As a W.K. Kellogg National Fellow, Brown studied cultural, racial and economic justice issues in Australia, Brazil, Guatemala, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Egypt, New Zealand and Chile. Brown's many organizational affiliations include the N.C. Coalition on Black and Brown Civic Participation, of which she is a founding member, the Latino Community Development Center, the N.C. Conservation Network, Democracy NC and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.

Bridgette Burge is the oral history coordinator of Heirs to a Fighting Tradition. Bridgette grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and graduated from Rhodes College in 1995 with a degree in Anthropology/Sociology and a semester of intensive study of oral history theory and methodology. In 1995 and 1996, Bridgette and a colleague conducted fieldwork in Honduras, Central America collecting the oral histories of six Honduran women. She earned her master’s degree in Applied Anthropology with a focus on urban grassroots collaborations from the University of Memphis in 1998. In 1999, she moved to North Carolina and served as North Carolina Peace Action’s state coordinator, and later as North Carolina Peace Action Education Fund’s executive director. Bridgette has been a social justice activist for over a decade with an emphasis on anti-imperialism efforts as well as cross-class and multiracial organizing. In 2005, she earned a Certificate in Nonprofit Management from Duke University and began her own consulting company to provide training, facilitation and planning support to social change organizations. With support from the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Bridgette launched the project “Heirs to a Fighting Tradition." The collection of interviews from this project will be archived at the Southern Historical Collection in the Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill and at other community-based places. She lives with her partner and two children in Knightdale, North Carolina.

Torrey Dixon was born in Danville, Virginia. He attended public school graduating in 1996 with honors from George Washington High School. After graduating from George Washington, he attended Averett University. At Averett, he was involved with the Baptist Student Union, including traveling as a student missionary to China. After graduating from Averett as the Valedictorian with a 4.0 GPA, he worked as a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the organization founded by MLK Jr. in the South). That inspired Torrey to attend law school. He declined acceptance at Harvard Law School so that he could attend both Theology and Law School at Duke University. After graduating from Duke, he completed a two-year fellowship working under famed civil rights attorney Julius Chambers (Thurgood Marshall's first intern at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund) at the University of North Carolina Law School Center for Civil Rights. Upon completing the fellowship, he founded FairVote North Carolina (a nonprofit which seeks electoral reform to increase meaningful and universal participation in open and honest elections). Torrey currently works on civil rights cases including one employment retaliation case currently before the Supreme Court's review.

Elena Everett is a trainer and curriculum developer for Heirs to a Fighting Tradition. She is a videographer, organizer, educator, and activist. She grew up in Rockledge, FL and earned an interdisciplinary Bachelors degree in Media Studies and Public Policy from North Carolina State University. Ms. Everett began as a campus organizer while a student at NC State and continues to work with youth and students to build leadership, with both high school and college age youth. She worked as a Program Associate at the Institute for Southern Studies from 2005-2007 and from 2005-2006 served as the Outreach Director for The Peoples Channel, Orange County’s public access television station. She works with a multi-generational, multi-cultural team of grassroots media activists to produce a bi-weekly cable access program called Independent Voices. The program, produced in North Carolina, currently airs in nearly 70 public access stations across the country and has been in production since 2004. In the summer of 2007, she developed and taught a student-centered curriculum for a youth media camp on documentary filmmaking for 13-16 year-olds at The Peoples Channel. Ms. Everett strongly believes in the power of story telling and the importance of teaching people the skills to document their own experiences - that storytelling is a powerful tool to transform society, understand ourselves and each other, and impact change.

Michelle Johnson has been blessed to have an opportunity to become the new director for the Heirs Project. After ten years of non-profit work in many settings including a rape crisis center, a University, and a high school she has left full time non-profit work to engage in many projects that will feed her soul, speak truth to justice, and serve the community. Michelle is a licensed clinical social worker with a small private practice in Chapel Hill, NC where she specializes in working with survivors of sexual violence, people who have experienced trauma, and people who have eating disorders. Michelle most recently left the Orange County Rape Crisis Center where she was the Associate Director. In her role at the Rape Crisis Center she supervised client and community education programs, and coordinated a short-term therapy program. In addition to the new role with the Heirs Project Michelle will be working part-time at the Mental Health Association in Orange County to develop a Pro Bono Counseling Network for people who are underinsured or uninsured. For seven years she has been working as a trainer with Dismantling Racism Works, dRWorks, a group focused on working with organizations and communities to develop an analysis about institutional and cultural racism. Michelle received her undergraduate degree in Psychology with a minor in Art from the College of William and Mary. In 1998 Michelle graduated from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill with a Masters in Social Work.

Zulayka Santiago - After almost a decade of working for institutions large and small, Zulayka has finally found her home as a FREElancer. Her spirit has come into this life to surrender more deeply to freedom and joy, and the projects that she chooses to work with fully support this marvelous journey. To that end, Zulayka currently devotes a portion of her waking hours to the North Carolina Peoples’ Coalition for Giving. As part of her institutional phase, Zulayka served first as Youth Program Director and then as Executive Director for El Pueblo Inc., a statewide Latino advocacy organization. This, among many other worthy endeavors. Zulayka received her undergraduate degree in Pan-African Studies from Barnard College, Columbia University. In 2001 she received a Master of Public Administration Degree from UNC-Chapel Hill with a Certificate in Nonprofit Management. Zulayka currently serves on the boards of Student Action with Farmworkers and stone circles, and is also on the Planning Team for Heirs to a Fighting Tradition. She is a part of the 06-08 William C. Friday Fellowship for Human Relations through the Wildacres Leadership Initiative.

Kathryn Stein is Creative Coordinator for Heirs to a Fighting Tradition. She was born in Toronto, Canada, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and lived in France as a high school exchange student. She has worked with immigrant communities in the US and pregnant and parenting women in Guatemala, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. In 2005, she graduated from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, with a Bachelors in Social Work and a minor in Social Studies of Medicine. For the next three years, she worked in Philadelphia as a home visitor in the field of HIV/AIDS, focusing on issues of child development, attachment, and social-emotional wellbeing. During this time, she created and facilitated an art/support group for HIV-positive adults, using disposable cameras and journals to promote the use of the arts as a tool of to decrease isolation and improve levels of emotional, spiritual and physical health.

Kathryn is currently finishing a multimedia documentary with the participants of the group she facilitated in Philadelphia, attending classes at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, and working as photographer for a documentary in North Hampton, North Carolina. She hopes to continue to combine her interests in public health, activism, and the arts toward promoting prevention and treatment measures and facilitating individual and community empowerment both here and abroad.

Heirs Project Planning Team members

Cynthia Brown
Bridgette Burge, Project Coordinator
Torrey Dixon
Elena Everett
Chantelle Fisher-Borne
Michelle Johnson, Director
Howie Machtinger
Zulayka Santiago
Kathryn Stein, Creative Coordinator