If I Had a Million Bucks… – Charleston Grit

BY STEPHANIE HUNT

If I had a million bucks, I’d give it ito Bill Stanfield at Metanoia. Hand it right over.  

In the spirit of the “Reinvent” theme at TEDxCharleston (an all-day immersion program happening today at PURE Theatre, designed to enrich the community via a stellar line-up of speakers and exchange of ideas), the Rev from North Chuck (via Princeton Theological Seminary) is reinventing the title “Reverend” with “revolutionary” in the Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood where he’s lived and worked for the last 11 years. And he delivered a tight, funny, thoughtful, rousing, well-spun hellfire and brimstone talk In this morning’s opening line-up of TEDxCharleston speakers.

Though he may have brought down the house with his presentation about re-envisioning community development in under-resourced neighborhoods, his work is all about bringing up households: throughlistening to the people who live in the community, and through investing in what’s going right in these neighborhoods, rather than in what’s going wrong. Stanfield has helped foster a major shift in mindset in one of North Charleston’s most challenged neighborhoods by galvanizing resources and good intentions and redirecting these toward accentuating and investing in the postive assets, not the deficits. It’s such a simple, profound a-ha moment—and only one of many that this morning’s bounty of TEDx inspiration has harvested thus far.

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