Background

During the multi-year national Campaign for Love & Forgiveness, sponsored by The Fetzer Institute, WTVI has held a series of group meetings and conversations focusing on the transforming power of love and forgiveness. The station’s initiative also involved letter writing, the airing of three Love & Forgiveness documentaries and personal exploration to help highlight the nature of forgiveness, and the role that forgiveness can play in different aspects of people’s lives.

WTVI Project Director, Beverly Dorn-Steele states, “Through the conversations, participants discovered how the role of love and forgiveness can affect our personal lives, our community and the workplace. There were some remarkable breakthroughs around challenging relationships with families, friends, spouses and co-workers. For many participants, the experience deepened their capacity for self-understanding and shifted their hurt to a more peaceful place.”

The WTVI campaign highlights include also:

The dedication of a Red Bench of Love as its symbol
The partnership with Mothers of Murdered Offspring (MOM-O) for a memorial service in honor of a missionary slain in Charlotte
A collaboration with the Afro-American Cultural Center Roundtable Fellows for a production called “If This Red Bench Could Speak”
The dedication of Charlotte’s Garden of Forgiveness

WTVI was one of only seven PBS stations to be awarded a grant from The Fetzer Institute to take part in the campaign. The overall campaign goal: to encourage conversation and reflection about how love and forgiveness can effect meaningful change in individuals.

Charlotte’s Garden of Forgiveness

Dorothy Counts-Scoggins encountered Woody Cooper more than half a decade ago. It was September 4, 1957, and she was integrating Harding High School. As she walked to the door of the school she was taunted and spit on by members of Harding's then all-white student body. Woody Cooper was among them. Although he did not shout any derogatory comments or throw any objects he felt responsible for the treatment she received that day.

Cooper wanted an opportunity to reconcile his personal feelings of guilt and regret. On June 10, 2010 from 11:30 am to 1 pm at Mahlon Adams Pavilion at Freedom Park (2435 Cumberland Avenue, Charlotte, NC) WTVI and the Red Bench Ambassadors dedicated Charlotte’s Garden of Forgiveness to celebrate The Campaign for Love & Forgiveness designed to provide a place where the community can experience love and peace. The Garden of Forgiveness will include the Red Bench of Love, a tangible symbol of the Love & Forgiveness campaign.

Dorothy Counts-Scoggins and Woody Cooper will be the first to experience the Red Bench of Love in the Garden of Forgiveness as Cooper apologizes to Counts-Scoggins during the ceremony. See links for highlights from dedication ceremony. For additional info, see loveandforgive.org.