From Rita L Ricks!
Your Heart is Listening to How You Lead
YOUR HEART IS LISTENING TO HOW YOU LEAD is a 90-minute leadership intensive for women 50+ held live on Zoom on March 24 at 7:00 PM. You manage your calendar with discipline, protect deadlines, oversee teams, and handle pressure. But after 50, something else requires the same precision: your emotional exposure. Many accomplished women are strong publicly and overextended privately. They lead organizations, care for aging parents, support children with complex needs, manage demanding bosses, tolerate disrespect, and wake at 3 a.m. thinking. They call it responsibility. The body calls it stress. This is not a basic webinar and it is not a self-care session. It is a structured, category-by-category leadership inventory to help you see clearly what you have normalized. We will move through professional load, caregiver strain, emotional containment, physical signals, financial pressure, and isolation. Each section begins with guided silence. You will write, see, and stop minimizing. Investment: $149. If you are accomplished on paper but carrying more than your nervous system should hold, this room is for you. The solution is in the silence. REGISTER.
Listening to the Silence is a restorative day designed to help you quiet the noise, listen inward, and align with what matters most. This gentle, guided retreat invites you into silence, not as absence, but as presence. Throughout the day, you’ll experience an inspiring and thought-provoking opening session with Rita, nearly four hours of personal quiet reflection, a shared midday Chapel moment, a nourishing chef-prepared lunch, and space to gently re-emerge and reflect together. Please bring a journal and pen that inspire you, a light blanket or yoga mat for comfort, and a short list of four meaningful things you’d like to complete in the first six months of 2026. We will begin promptly at 9:00 a.m. Please arrive early, settle in, and be seated, ready to embrace the gift of silence. Date: March 14. Time: 9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. Cost: $55.00. Silence Registration!
Louisa’s Bright Hope Baptist Church earns historic recognition after community members pitched in with research
Bonnie Newman Davis/Charlottesville Tomorrow
Rev. Damaro Robinson, minister of Bright Hope Baptist Church in Louisa County, delivers a sermon on Nov. 2, 2025. The church was recently approved for designation on the Virginia Landmarks Register. “It’s been a very lengthy process, and a lot of people have really worked hard for it,” said Robin Patton, a retired environmental engineer who assisted with research and helped submit the 153-page nomination. Bonnie Newman Davis/Charlottesville Tomorrow
On a crisp Sunday morning in early November, about two dozen worshippers at Bright Hope Baptist Church clapped and shouted “Amen” as Rev. Damaro Robinson reminded the congregants that by standing firm in their faith, “other doors are already open and waiting for you to come through.”
Bright Hope Baptist’s members are accustomed to their church opening its doors to the community during uncertain times. After being established in 1882 by freedmen and freedwomen in Louisa County during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, the church soon became more than a place of worship. Historical records reflect how the white, Gothic Revival-style structure has long educated Black youth, provided holiday meals to local residents and hosted revival meetings offering prayer, preaching and songs.
On Sept. 18, Bright Hope Baptist Church and Cemetery’s legacy of leadership, cultural preservation and opening doors was recognized when the Commonwealth’s Board of Historic Resources approved it for designation on the Virginia Landmarks Register (VLR). The VLR is Virginia’s official list of places of historic, architectural, archaeological and cultural significance.
Members of the church’s congregation are elated by the news.
Lisa Aaron, Bright Hope’s secretary and Sunday service videographer, proudly noted the influence of Rev. Fountain M. Perkins, the church’s first ordained pastor who served Bright Hope after the church was established.
Before leading Bright Hope, Perkins spoke at political meetings and was considered a candidate for the Constitutional Convention of 1867–1868, the first election in which Virginia’s African American men could vote, according to the Virginia House of Delegates Clerk’s Office. In 1869, he won one of the county’s two seats in the House of Delegates. “He voted to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which the state was required to do before being re-admitted to the United States,” according to his biography published on the clerk’s office website.
Perkins did not run for reelection in 1871, but remained active in local politics and served as an election judge, the clerk’s office further states.
Honoring Our Elders
On Sunday, November 23, 2025, Second Baptist Church on Idlewood Avenue in Richmond’s west end honored its church members who are 90 years of age or older. Second Baptist is led by the Rev. Dr. James H. Henry Harris, who also is celebrating his 35th anniversary of Second Baptist. The church, one of the oldest places of worship in Richmond, VA. was established in 1842.
BND Institute of Media & Culture 