Bi'Anncha Andrews

Bi'Anncha Andrews (she/her) is a Licensed Social Worker and current Doctoral Candidate in the Urban and Regional Planning and Design program at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Her research investigates the impacts of gentrification and displacement on low-income and middle-class, African American communities, while centering the intersecting roles that race, class, and gender have played in shaping neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage with limited access to effective social services and social support networks. More specifically, her work pays particular attention to the disruptions it causes for Black Women who are displaced from public housing projects. Her dissertation investigates how Black Women navigate their transition out of gentrifying neighborhoods, and how they begin to rebuild their social service and neighborhood-based support networks in their new environments. In doing so, it seeks to provide academics, practitioners and policy makers a foundation for strategizing on ways to improve urban redevelopment and restoration practices, social service distribution and support network access to account for the losses that vulnerable populations often suffer as a result of exclusionary development.

Bi'Anncha has taught Advanced Planning Courses at the University of Maryland including Community Development which she served as the lead instructor; and the Advanced Community Planning Studio course which she served as the Teaching Assistant with Dr. Clara Irazabal.

In addition to her academic work, Bi’Anncha worked extensively as a front line, licensed Social Worker with the Compass Program at the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of Washington. As a Compass Partner, Bi’Anncha worked with adults, families, and communities in environments in which people need support in managing and navigating some of life's most challenging circumstances. She has extensive training in nonviolent crisis intervention, trauma-informed care, solution-focused therapy, and community organizing.

The purpose of her work has been to have a positive effect on the social and physical environment in which people live their lives, bridge the divide between academia and local neighborhood-based planning, and influence policy and practices that bring equity, access and enhancement to the quality of life found in low-income communities of color.

RESEARCH INTERESTS/SPECIALIZATIONS:

Residential and Commercial Gentrification, Anti-Displacement, Dispossession Public Housing Demolition, Residential Segregation, Concentrated Poverty,  Black Feminist Theory, Access to Social Services and Social Support Networks, Restorative and Reparative Planning Practices

Rev. Joanne M. Braxton, PhD

Rev. Dr. Joanne Braxton, President of the Braxton Institute for Sustainability, Resiliency and Joy is Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor Emeritus at William & Mary and Adjunct Professor of Family and Community Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS). Braxton is poet and a scholar whose books include Black Female Sexualities (2015), Monuments of the Black Atlantic: Slavery and Memory (2003), Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Casebook (1993), The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1993), Wild Women in the Whirlwind: The Renaissance in Contemporary Afra-American Writing (1990), Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (1989) and Sometimes I Think of Maryland (1977), a collection of poetry. She leads the Braxton Institute’s Reparations4LakelandNow! campaign and is working on a new book, Reparations as Soul Repair (Skinner House). Her healing work with physicians and health care workers emerged from the teaching of “Medicine, Arts and Social Justice,” as well as clinical medical education trainings she co-taught for EVMS, and other entities. An ordained minister with standing in the Southern Conference of the United Church of Christ, she has also provided spiritual care in university, congregational and movement settings. During the Covid-19 pandemic Dr. Braxton led Luce Foundation supported “Black Faith Matters” Circles of Care, for impacted health care workers, healers and thought leaders. In 2025, Dr. Braxton will facilitate a new Circle of Care for people doing the work of Reparations, offering trauma-informed spiritual care, collective healing from collective trauma, and spiritual grounding for dangerous times.

Of Reparations4LakelandNow! she writes:
“Lakeland was our Beloved Community, a Healthy Urban Habitat where our core values were served and enriched: Love for family, Care and Trust among Neighbors, Safety and Nurture for all our Children, Respect and Loving Support for our Elders, Self-Empowerment and Community Building through sharing our skills and resources for the common good, Spiritual and Moral foundations—taught and embodied. We had the five pillars of a healthy Urban Community: adequate housing, ample indoor and outdoor gathering spaces, culturally appropriate educational institutions, easy access to public transportation connecting us to the larger metro areas, close connections to nature epitomized by our lake and food-producing gardens and animals. This can and must be restored; all of the parties responsible for the harm and destruction caused by what we now see as ‘planned shrinkage’ and/or ‘dispossession by design’ must be called into account and invited into the process of repair. Above all, future harm to what is left of Lakeland must be prevented. Those responsible for past harm must step up to break the cycle of slow violence that is still in play.”

Maxine Gross

Chairperson, Lakeland Community Heritage Project

Maxine Gross is a fifth-generation member of College Park’s historic African American community, Lakeland. Her family’s contribution to the University of Maryland dates from the early 1900s with employment by her great uncle Ferdinand Hughes, great grandmother, grandfather (48 years) and father (28 years). She was the first of the family able to enroll at the University, completing a Bachelor of Arts degree. Maxine is the founding chairperson of the Lakeland Community Heritage Project. She also serves on the boards of the College Park City- University Partnership and Embry Center for Family Life. Maxine is a former College Park City Council member.

Rev. Dr. Rebecca Ann Parker, D.Min.

(she/hers), Founding Secretary of the Board

Rebecca Parker educated a generation of ministers, scholars, artists and civic leaders during her 25-year stint as President and Professor of Theology at the Starr King School for the Ministry, the Unitarian Universalist and multi-religious theological school  in Berkeley, California.  Through her leadership, the historically white liberal School was transformed to become a multi-racial, counter-oppressive institution. Now emerita, she is  a noted feminist theologian  and author, a poet, a musician and a composer, and a life-long advocate for social change. A graduate of Claremont Theological School,  she is the author (or co-author) of several books, including Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire and Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves Us, both with Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock. Dr. Parker, a fourth generation United Methodist minister,  holds ministerial standing in the Unitarian Universalist Association as well as the United Methodist Church where she has been a life-long advocate for LGBTQ full inclusion and racial justice.   A founding board member,  Dr. Parker has been the primary architect of the Braxton Institute  programs on Recovery from Moral Injury and with it, our collaborations with the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School and Volunteers of America, leading seminars for teaching faculty during the 2017 “Moral Injury and Collective Healing” advanced training seminar in Princeton, New Jersey and the 2019 national “Recovery from Moral Injury” training seminar in Los Angeles. She was a keynote speaker at our inaugural “Recovering Human Sustainability in a Time of War” program in Williamsburg, Virginia in 2014 and more recently led a stimulating Braxton Institute Community Dialogue on “Grounding Resistance in Love and Joy”  in Washington, D.C.  In 2019 she also co-presented an online Dialogue on “The Human Ecology of Racism” with board member Richael Faithful. 

On her work as a theologian and minister, Parker says "Legacies of violence, terror and trauma continue to bring anguish into the world.  Now more than ever, people of conscience and love need to do the hard work of theological thinking that deconstructs religion that sanctions violence.  We need to re-dedicate ourselves to the creation of life-giving theologies, justice-making religious communities, and joy-infusing spiritual practices. This is the calling to which my life is devoted and I’m grateful to be part of the work of the Braxton Institute which advances sustainability, resiliency and joy!”