Diversity and Dialogue Dinner

The Atlantic Institute is pleased to announce the new Diversity and Dialogue Dinner event! This represents a partial reformatting of our annual Atlantic Peace and Dialogue Awards Dinner toward spotlighting community endeavors more comprehensively. We have been recognizing outstanding community organizations for over 10 years, and this year is no different. We have narrowed down to what we feel exemplify the key tenets of the Atlantic Institute's mission: Community Efforts and Peace through Dialogue.

Publicly recognizing these organizations encourages them to continue in their efforts to lead others in mutual understanding and educates those in attendance on their community organizations. It is an honor to recognize these organizations each year.

These two organizations have been selected for their continuing contributions to good will and dedication to fostering communication between disparate groups of people in the Upstate. Members of these organizations and their guests are invited to a special community dinner where they can share and educate those in attendance about their work.

This year there are two recognition awards this year:

Peace and Dialogue Category:

The recipient in this category must hold some leadership role in government, business or nonprofit and have used their position

to create an environment that encourages diversity and cooperation between individuals from a variety of backgrounds,

cultures, or faith traditions.

This year's Peace and Dialogue Recipient is My Neighbor's Voice a non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring dialogue across

cultural and ideological boundaries.

 We are proud to recognize these vital community organizations by shining the spotlight on them for the community

Public and Community Service Category:

This individual or group must have made a large contribution to their local community through involvement in community service,

organized projects, and/or recruited diverse individuals to participate in community service projects.

This year's Public and Community Service Recipient is SEARCHlight.

The SEARCHlight Initiative is an organized group of dedicated seniors working in partnership with United Housing Connections (UHC), a 501(c)3, to raise funds to build permanent supportive housing for those in our community suffering from chronic homelessness and mental illness. To-date they have raised nearly 1 million dollars to fund the Church St Place Project – 36 studio units modeled after UHC’s Reedy Place.