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 made up of the director, academic advisor, two trainers and a Speak Your Truth community organizer. Independent consultants are occasionally contracted for specific pieces of work.

The project also benefits from the institutional support of the Southern Oral History Program at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. Heirs to a Fighting Tradition receives funding from the North Carolina Humanities Council, stone circles, The People’s Alliance Fund, the Fenwick Foundation, and individual donors.

Nikki Brown is the creative coordinator for Heirs to a Fighting Tradition. Ms. Brown is an Eastern North Carolina native and lifelong visual artist with a vested interest in fair play and a passion for hearing peoples' stories. She views her work with creative audio and photo documentaries as a way to combine these passions in a format that is accessible to her and others like her who are dealing with visual impairments, as well as to provide an empowering outlet for the storyteller in all of us. She believes her work allows people to see and hear how much we all have in common and to recognize that we all want and need some of the same things; to be heard, to be held, and to be healed in community. For the past few years she been creating audio designed to provide the same experience that she presents in her visual art: a scene that fills the senses, answers a question, takes you to another place, and invites you to bear witness.

Bridgette Burge is the director of Heirs to a Fighting Tradition. Ms. Burge 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, Burge and a colleague conducted fieldwork in Honduras, Central America collecting the oral histories of six Honduran women. She earned her master’s degree in Anthropology 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. Burge has been a social justice activist for over a decade with an emphasis on peace and anti-imperialism efforts as well as cross-class and multiracial organizing. She earned a Certificate in Nonprofit Management from Duke University in 2005, began her own consulting company to provide training, facilitation and planning support to social change organizations, and with the support of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Burge launched the project “Heirs to a Fighting Tradition: Oral Histories of North Carolina Social Justice Activists.” The collection of interviews from this project will be archived at the Southern Historical Collection in the Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill.

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.

Russell Herman works as an independent organizer building an effective movement throughout North Carolina that can grow to include everyone and address all our issues. He draws on decades of experience to advise organizations, to coach their leaders and organizers, to facilitate cooperation among them, and to help them develop a movement that can transform our state and do our part to transform the whole of human society.

Manju Rajendran Manju Rajendran is a 26 year-old organizer from Durham, NC. She has helped with vision, design, development and outreach for the Heirs Project. Manju and her family immigrated to the United States from India when she was a child. As a biology student at UNC-Chapel Hill, Manju was awarded the Davis-Putter Scholarship for young activists. She has shown leadership in many organizations, including School in the Community, Youth Voice Radio, NC Lambda Youth Network, Hip-Hop Against Racist War, Southerners On New Ground, and the House of Mango, a living collective of young activists in Durham. Manju was a member of Breaking the Chains, an anti-imperialist coalition, and she has worked with the NC Peace and Justice Coalition. She is on the national advisory board of Not Your Soldier.

Charles D. Thompson, Jr., Ph.D., education and curriculum director at CDS, is an adjunct faculty member in the Duke departments of cultural anthropology and religion. He directs the undergraduate program at CDS. He holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from UNC-Chapel Hill, with concentrations in cultural studies, ethnography, and Latin American studies. His particular interests in documentary work fall into the categories of oral history, ethnography, and community activism. A former farmer, he remains immersed in agricultural issues and the cultures that surround our food system. He has written about farmworkers, and he is an advisory board member of Student Action with Farmworkers. His latest book, with Melinda Wiggins, is The Human Cost of Food: Farmworker Lives, Labor, and Advocacy. Currently Thompson is researching the history, culture, and agriculture of the Old German Baptist Brethren in the mountains of Virginia. He has also published a book and several articles on Guatemalan Maya refugees.

Heirs Project Planning Team members

Nikki Brown, creative coordinator
Bridgette Burge, director
Elena Everett, trainer
Russell Herman, independent cross-sector organizer
Manju Rajendran, community organizer
Dr. Charles Thompson, academic advisor

Heirs Project Advisory Council

Calvin Allen, Southern Rural Development Initiative
Meredith Emmett, Third Space Studios
Gita Gulati-Partee, OpenSource Leadership Strategies
Dr. Robert Korstad, Duke University’s Sanford Institute of Public Policy
Barbara Zelter, formerly with the North Carolina Council of Churches