The Listening Project is a 501-3c non-profit organization originally founded as Rural Southern Voice for Peace (RSVP). We are based in Celo Community in the mountains of western North Carolina.

Herb Walters, our executive director, started the organization in 1981 with support from his wife Marnie, the Arthur Morgan School, Ernest Morgan, Celo Friends (Quaker) Meeting, and other residents of Celo Community and Yancey County, NC.

 

For thirty years Herb has helped community-based organizations develop successful Listening Projects that have successfully addressed issues of social and economic justice; ethnic, racial, religious and cultural conflict; community health and education; and sustainable economic development.

 

The Listening Project are deep listening interviews include often unheard or unheeded voices that can bring new perspectives to both problems and solutions. The interviews are processed and analyzed. This deepens understanding of community needs and problems, and it reveals new resources for successful community organizing and action.

 

Community organizers from almost every state in the U.S, and eight other countries have been essential for numerous successful Community Listening Projects. We are blessed to have worked with so many incredible people. Most of these organizers and community leaders volunteer their time or work for very little. They rise to the call to give deeply of themselves for the benefit of their communities. They continually inspire us!