H.E.A.L. (Helping Educate and Lift)

Heal, Educate, And Lift (H.E.A.L.) is a cohort of the Diversity Leaders Initiative (DLI) Program through the Riley Institute at Furman University. We are a diverse group of community leaders fueled by our desire to facilitate meaningful and intentional change in our community. H.E.A.L. selected to pursue EJI’s Soil Collection Project as our Capstone Community Action Project for DLI because of our genuine commitment to progress in South Carolina. We recognize that before we can move forward as a community, the reign of racial terror that permeated Greenville, South Carolina, and the state, overall, must be acknowledged. The mission of the project is to memorialize the history of lynching in Greenville, South Carolina by initially hosting a meaningful community dialogue surrounding racial terror and then collecting a soil sample from the site of one of the four lynching locations. The desired outcome is to begin the process of healing through acknowledgment, building trust, and breaking down barriers.