Community activist Reggie Guyton has lived life increasingly aware of the inequities aimed at people due to their skin tones and inability to pay for things that bring them joy.
Guyton, a historic actor at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, grew up in University Park, a village in the south suburbs of Chicago.
“All my life I’ve been around people who were disenfranchised, and if not lower middle class, certainly poor, and I have seen us try to make the best out of situations,” Guyton says. “It’s incredibly hard to dig out of trenches when you don’t really have a ladder or a way of escape.”
Guyton said he couldn’t participate in school activities that mattered to him because of the expenses.
As a college student, Guyton observed racial commentary around the fatal shooting in 2012 of the Black teenager Trayvon Martin by a man in Sanford, Florida, and the U.S.’ first black president, Barack Obama, that helped him “to be hyperaware of the reality of my skin tone.”
“It became very apparent that something was wrong, and I didn’t know how to fix it, but I knew that I wanted to have conversation around it, so I just kind of dove in,” Guyton says.
Guyton, a District 21 Sangamon County Board member, was among a group of 10 people from the Springfield area who took more steps to “fix it” in April when they attended training in Texas that was hosted by the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice.
The Kairos Center is a national organization with a goal to build a movement, led by the poor, to end poverty.
The Kairos training at the Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly in Hunt, Texas, spurred a local “Survival Revival” movement, an event which will take place from11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday, July 18, at Comer Cox Park, 301 Martin Luther King Drive, Springfield.
The focus of the family-friendly Survival Revival will be on housing insecurity, reforming qualified immunity – which shields law enforcement officers from individual civil liability in lawsuits –and working to preserve democracy through voter education, registration and mobilization.
Survival Revival will have free food, speakers, information booths, live music, performances and activities for children.
From left to right: Renee Bell, Tiara Standage, Susan Phillips, Zach Adams, Reggie Guyton (back), Karen Broquet (front), JB George, Boris Bernardino (front), Danielle Webster and Candice Trees were part of a group of artists and activists from around the country who attended an April 18-22 training session in Texas hosted by the Kairos center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice. PHOTO COURTESY OF SUSAN PHILLIPS
Tiara Standage – founder, executive director and harm reduction specialist at Intricate Minds community center who attended the Kairos training – says Survival Revival’s “overarching” purpose is to bring the community together.
“We’re trying to remove the barriers from people getting services,” says Standage, who also is president and founder of The Purple Coalition (People United for Reform, Power, Liberation & Equity), a community activist group. “Bring the kids. There’ll be free food. It’ll be starting right at lunchtime, so come hungry and just with an open mind, ready to learn, ready to meet new people.”
Survival Revival will bring organizations together for the mutual benefit of the community.
“(There are) so many people doing so much good work in this community. One of the things where we could do better if we were more coordinated,” says the Rev. Susan Phillips, pastor at First Presbyterian Church in downtown Springfield, who led the group to the Kairos training.
“We oftentimes miss what someone else is doing, and then I know I find out the day after something fabulous happened and wished I could have been there, so if there are ways that we can coordinate our efforts more, we might achieve our goals more quickly or more broadly or more effectively.”
A Kairos base
The recent Kairos training in Texas was an organizing training centered around summer Survival Revival projects, Standage says.
“It was basically breaking down what that looks like through a Kairos lens and then how we can translate that to benefit Springfield,” Standage says.
The Kairos Center developed a clearer view of what a model for organizing looks like through publication of its report “A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis.”
The report studies the “survival strategies” organizations employed during and since the coronavirus pandemic, which was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020 and declared by WHO in May 2023 at an end as a public health emergency of international concern.
The report looked at how communities took care of each other.
“More than a review of what was accomplished through these ‘survival strategies,’ this report is an appeal to organizers, clergy, cultural workers and other community leaders to engage in these activities more deliberately and strategically, turning collective acts of survival into organized programs of protest, resistance and power-building,” the report says.
“It is also an instruction manual for those communities on the frontlines of the attacks coming from an authoritarian movement that has seized even greater power in the 2024 election cycle and a road map for what it will take to provide for marginalized communities through these crises to create a society where everybody can thrive, not merely survive.”
The report offers an organizing model for projects of survival that “focuses on the concrete activity of meeting unmet needs” and “develops a process of political formation connected to that activity.”
“In April, we brought delegations from five regions together to prepare for a ‘Season of Survival Revivals’ this summer,” the Kairos Center’s May 12 Facebook post says.
“Through art, song, study and action, and powered by our diverse histories and traditions, we began to envision an organizing model that could meet our daily needs, withstand this moment and inspire our political imaginations. More than a series of events, the Survival Revivals will lay claim to the society we deserve and know is possible.”
Tiara Standage outside an ICE facility in San Antonio, Texas. PHOTO BY ZACH ADAMS
Presbyterian minister Phillips first met Kairos Center executive director the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis in 2019 at an anti-racism conference in North Carolina through the Presbyterian Church U.S.A.
“The way she talked about collaborative organizing and community building felt so right to me about how we can make the most difference and also described ways of collaborating that I thought would be really beneficial in Springfield,” says Phillips, who is co-chair for the Illinois Poor People’s Campaign, a worship designer and who has served as a member of the Massey Commission, a citizens’ commission established in response to the killing of a Black woman from Springfield, Sonya Massey.
By 2026, Phillips led a team to Texas to learn more.
“In April, we took a team of 10 to Texas so that we could train together and then come back and share what we learned with a wider group of activists and artists and musicians in preparation for a July Survival Revival event for the whole community,” Phillips says.
“Originally, it was supposed to be a smaller team. We were asked to bring two artists and two musicians and three activists and then later they expanded it and said we could bring six activists.”
What more training can do
Tiara Standage didn’t call herself an activist until after the Sonya Massey murder propelled her to action on behalf of that case.
Massey, 36, was an unarmed Black woman shot on July 6, 2024, by Sean Grayson, who is white and was a deputy of the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office. Grayson is serving a 20-year prison sentence for second-degree murder.
“I was the first person to kind of go on the news and ask questions about that,” says Standage, who is 36. “I organized 12 peaceful protests, demanding accountability and answers with the Sonya Massey case, as well as several other marches and peace events. Really, just kind of my activism and advocacy for Sonya Massey is what made people start calling me an activist.”
Standage founded Intricate Minds, a no-barrier community resources entity, in 2023, after forming a heart toward harm reduction that stems from her background of overcoming challenges.
Born in Springfield, Standage and her family lived in Chicago from the time she was in kindergarten through seventh grade. Then she moved back to Springfield.
“I, myself, was a homeless youth. I also lost my mother four years ago to a fentanyl overdose, and I lost my father 11 years ago to gun violence,” Standage says.
“That’s all very tied into the community work I do in harm reduction, just lessen the harm that is enforced onto our community by various systems and making sure that our most vulnerable neighbors have access to basic public health and some of their basic needs being met without barriers.”
Standage’s work already aligns with the Kairos mission, she says. However, the Kairos training in Texas was an opportunity for her to meet people who are “very like-minded, aligned to the work that I already do.”
“People can’t organize if their basic needs aren’t met. That’s kind of what I do. That’s my job as a harm reduction specialist,” says Standage, a former certified nursing assistant, nurse and dental assistant.
Reggie Guyton, center, speaks with other participants during the training held at the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice. PHOTO BY ZACH ADAMS
Boris Bernardoni, a recent Lincoln Land Community College graduate who hopes to go into grant management and organizing, also attended the Kairos training.
Bernardoni’s mother, Shatriya Smith, executive director of the Garvey Tubman Cultural Arts & Research Center in Springfield, shaped Bernardoni’s activism from infancy.
“I would ride around with her, and we would go to these protests and marches,” says Bernardoni, 22, who is affiliated with the center. “My first time speaking was at a women’s march, and I recited a poem there…Through my mother, I definitely got my voice a lot easier than a lot of people and a lot quicker than a lot of people, and it kind of just pushed me in that direction.”
Go forth and teach
Kairos training participants learned to create artwork for use at the July 18 Survival Revival in Springfield as well as learning music. There were two areas of training: one for organizational participants and one called “SKOR” (Songs in the Key of Resistance) for artists and singers.
An artist, Bernardoni learned about materials needed to make organized art builds and facilitate community in an artistic way so that unified protest signs and banners could present a unified message.
Standage participated in a “Black Joy Circle” during the Kairos Center training.
“The purpose of it was to bring more Black songs and things from Black liberation movements into the Kairos program because a big part of it is resistance through song,” Standage says. “It was received very well. We did an action the next day at a San Antonio ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) building, and a lot of those songs came into play at that action, and it was a beautiful thing to see.”
Kairos training participants stood outside the ICE building. They sang, prayed, stood in support and solidarity of families going into the ICE building – some who had immigration appointments; some who had appointments for deportation.
“I know there was one man whose lawyer spoke with one of the representatives from Kairos at the beginning and asked us to stay out there a little longer and be out there while his client was in there,” Standage says. “He did let us know that his client was not deported that day. That made me feel really good about the action.”
Boris Bernardino (standing, right) and other artists work on a banner. PHOTO BY ZACH ADAMS
The action also made an impression on volunteers who offered mutual aid in the form of food, snacks and water to people waiting to see their families.
“I noticed, like me, one of the volunteers had a ‘he/him’ pin. I noticed they were also a trans man like me, so I came out to them and started talking,” Bernardoni says. “I told them that everyone at the Kairos Center action who were at the detention center that day were from all across the country, and they had no idea.”
The volunteer looked around the large crowd and told Bernardoni that while protests take place at the detention center, it had never been that size.
“They had no idea that it was from so many people just across the country,” Bernardoni says. “I could actively see in that moment, the impact of knowing that this is from all these different kinds of people from all across the country (the) impact that had on someone who lives there and works there just trying to help out the community in need around them.”
Reggie Guyton says he’s new to activism and learning about activist etiquette and organizing.
“There are a lot of people that want better and just don’t know how to get it, and I think we all need to advocate for each other,” Guyton says. “What better way for me to be of service than to learn how to be of service?”
Community activism is specific for Phillips.
“For me, being a community activist is acting with the community in ways that hold me accountable and center the community people’s needs and greatest wisdom,” Phillips says.
“There is wisdom in the gathered community that benefits all of us, if we’re willing to learn.”
Tamara “Tammie” Browning is a freelance writer and reporter from Petersburg, Illinois. She has a weekly newsletter “Mother Road Moves” on Substack that chronicles the people, places, things and happenings on Route 66 – from Illinois to California.
This article appears in May 28-June 3, 2026.
