Saturday, September 26 will bring us the next Maryland Pan Afrikan Community Town Hall Meeting, sponsored by the Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition (MPACC), a coalition of several Pan Afrikan and Black-led organizations primarily in the Baltimore, Maryland area.  This will be the second Town Hall of 2026, the first having taken place on March 21.  The Town Hall Meeting will begin at 11:00 AM on Saturday, September 26 and will end at 3:00 PM.

The location of this Town Hall will be, as was the first session, the Temple of New African Thought (TNAT), 5525 Harford Road in East Baltimore.  Dr. Dennis Ausar Winkler, an Afrikan centered counselor and therapist who has held numerous community-oriented events at TNAT and who hosts “Conversations With Dr. DAW”, a regular podcast that airs several times a week on YouTube, has once again made his excellent establishment available for the community to hold this session.

The Town Hall will mainly concentrate on four (4) main topics:

1. The upcoming International Conference of the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus in Accra, Ghana from October 6-9, 2026.  On Friday September 18, Bro. Cliff, Editor of KUUMBAReport Online, Moderator of the Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition (MPACC) and Maryland Facilitator for the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus (SRDC; https://srdcinternational.org) was at the African Union Mission (“Africa House”) in Washington, DC for a forum around the latest efforts in the African Union’s Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) to finally make real the “20 AU ECOSOCC representative seats for the Afrikan Diaspora” promise the African Union (AU) made back in 2003.  Another Baltimore area activist, Sis. Kim Poole of the Teaching Artist Institute (TAI), was assisting them with this event and had invited myself and others to attend to provide important information on the efforts of one of the organizations I belong to (the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus, or SRDC) to devise a method for electing Diaspora representatives to ECOSOCC who would be in a position to truly speak for the grassroots Pan Afrikan Diaspora there.  That work is ongoing, even though the AU ECOSOCC seems to have come up with their own method (that I don’t think is quite satisfactory) at the moment.  I mention this session because it directly pertains to SRDC’s upcoming International Conference in Accra, Ghana from October 6-9, which I will also be attending as SRDC’s Maryland Facilitator.  The Town Hall Meeting agenda below provides about 10 minutes for me to announce the conference and encourage questions and discussion. 
2. Re-Introduction to the Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition through the Town Hall Process.  These Town Hall Meetings were actually organized by SRDC from 2007 through 2019, and after COVID hit and people didn’t gather in large groups for a couple of years, we made the decision to have subsequent Town Hall Meetings convened by a coalition of Pan Afrikan organizations.  That coalition, which I had been attempting to popularize for several years even before COVID, finally started up with several Zoom meetings with local area activists in January 2022.  In the early summer of 2023, the Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition (MPACC) began to hold these Town Hall Meetings based on the idea that a coalition of organizations would more effectively enlist the participation of the area’s activists and organizers than one specific organization like SRDC would.  The organizing principle of the Cooperative Coalition is what I’ve called “Spokes of the Wheel”, rejecting a strict hierarchical structure that could be seen as marginalizing some groups, or a simple “just come and unify” non-plan that could invite chaos, in favor of a “spoked wheel” model to organize on an equal footing (the “rim”) around a shared objective (the “hub”) that had been used by Ancestor Mary McLeod Bethune’s National Council of Negro Women in 1935.  I plan to offer a very brief “re-introduction” to MPACC for those who are still unfamiliar with the organizing concept. 
3. Rebuilding the Maryland Council of Elders.  Another issue we will want to discuss, before getting to the “main event”, is the rebuilding of the Maryland Council of Elders (MCOE).  MCOE is the third incarnation of an Elders Council since SRDC had become involved in community-organizing efforts in 2007.  It was established after a series of five (5) Town Hall Meetings in the second half of 2017, and it started off with nine (9) members, grassroots and Pan Afrikanist veteran activists who had been nominated by attendees at those five Town Halls and recognized through Afrikan Consensus.  We felt it was important to establish community recognition, at least by the relatively small number of people at those Town Hall Meetings, because an Elders Council that is imposed on the community without acknowledgement by at least local activists would not be able to exert any real authority, or even provide guidance, to a community that does not recognize them.  Those nine Elders ran several more Town Hall Meetings together with SRDC from 2018 through 2019, but after COVID hit, several MCOE members either “retired” from the Council or were called to be among the Honored Ancestors.  As a result, MCOE went from that high of nine members down to the current four (4).  Thus, our second major agenda item (scheduled between the brief re-introduction to the Cooperative Coalition which is holding this Town Hall and the “main event” of the session) will be the rebuilding of the Maryland Council of Elders.  We will discuss the proposed tasks for the Council (guidance, correction and mediation to organizers, activists and community members), the qualifications for membership, the process of establishing new members and the actual recruitment of Elders to join the Council. 
4. The Food Sovereignty Panel.  After these issues are discussed, we will hold a “Food Sovereignty Panel” to be made up of urban gardeners, advocacy organizations such as the Black Yield Institute and organizations that could take a role in bringing Black farmers’ and urban gardeners’ food to the people (Black-run farmers’ markets and Black-owned groceries such as the FOCA ROC grocery of the UNIA in Queens, New York).  What we will be seeking is the beginning of a plan to move our community from its present state of food apartheid (a term that may have first been coined by Bro. Eric Jackson of the Black Yield Institute) to one of food sovereignty (where we have not only access to food but also input into how we obtain that access and from what sources for the betterment of our grassroots communities).

We may also have a couple of important guests attend who would like to introduce themselves to the Town Hall attendees, either in person or over Zoom.

Again, here is the basic information on the Saturday, September 26 Town Hall: 

Saturday, September 26, 2026
11:00 AM – 3:00 PM
Temple of New African Thought (TNAT), 5525 Harford Road, Baltimore, Maryland

In summary, our agenda for the meeting is to cover the following four topics:

• Re-introducing the Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition (@ 5 minutes)
• SRDC’s October 6-9 International Conference in Accra, Ghana (@ 10 minutes)
• Re-Building the Maryland Council of Elders (MCOE)
• Panel Discussion: Moving from Food Apartheid to Food Sovereignty, with Urban Gardeners, Black Farmers and Advocacy/Support Organizations (the “main event”)

If you are interested in attending this Town Hall and will be in the area, do make plans to stop by the Temple of New African Thought (TNAT).  And we also invite you to stick around for the 5:00 PM event being held by the Pan Afrikan Liberation Movement (PLM) that will immediately follow our Town Hall Meeting.

If you are interested in attending but will not be in the area, contact Bro. Cliff at cliff@kuumbareport.com to see about catching the session over Zoom.