RDE Community Initiative Somerville · Fayette County · Tennessee

Somerville · Fayette County · Tennessee

Rooted in healing.
Rising in power.
Building together.

The RDE Community Initiative helps neighbors grow their own food, claim their civic voice, and rebuild the shared places where a community learns. Three programs, one conviction: the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution.

Find your part See the programs
Neighbors and children planting seedlings together in a community garden bed.

A neighborhood rises together — or not at all.

Resource Development Empowerment Associates is a community empowerment effort in Somerville and Fayette County, Tennessee. We work on three things at once, because they hold each other up: food and health, civic voice, and places to learn.

This did not start in a grant office. It started with listening to neighbors, and with a study of what has actually lifted communities like ours — gardens that fed families, organizing that won the vote, and schools that a community built with its own hands. Those things worked. They can work again.

Everything here is designed to be owned by the people who live here. Not delivered to the neighborhood. Built by it.

Collectively we can each contribute toward doing well together by doing good and bringing one another along — because collective engagement is naturally right and good, like mother's milk. Rodney Dotson, founder

Our place, our people

Somerville, Tennessee

Fayette County carries a deep history of self-determination — families who fed themselves, neighbors who organized for the vote, and communities that built their own schools when no one else would. That legacy is still here, in the land and in the people.

So are real gaps. We name them plainly, not as hardship to dwell on, but as the openings where this work makes a difference.

  • Fresh food is out of easy reach Too many households drive too far for fruits and vegetables they could be growing a block away.
  • Local leadership is ready, and under-invited The talent to lead this county already lives here. It needs a table, a mentor, and a turn.
  • Places to gather and learn have thinned out When the community schools closed, something more than a building went with them.
A planted field of rows and vegetables on the edge of a rural Fayette County neighborhood.
Produce set out on wooden shelves at a local farm stand.
Display banners set up for a community meeting in a local hall.

What we do

Three programs, one curriculum

Gardening, civil rights, and community building are taught and practiced together — the way the old community schools taught them.

Gardening for Healing

Food, health, and healing from the ground up.
  • Community gardens on vacant lots that grow fresh food for families and local pantries
  • Hands-on workshops in nutrition, cooking, and sustainable growing
  • Green, quiet space that restores the body, the mind, and the spirit
  • Elders passing gardening wisdom and culture on to the young
  • Real job skills in horticulture, market gardening, and the growing green trades

Why it matters: a garden answers a food gap and a health gap at the same time, and it puts three generations in the same row of dirt.

Rows of vegetables and flowers growing in a community garden plot.

Civil Rights Empowerment

Know your rights. Find your voice. Take your seat.
  • Nonpartisan civic and voter education — how change actually happens
  • Civil rights history and know-your-rights basics
  • Leadership development for emerging community leaders
  • Mentorship that pairs seasoned leaders with rising ones
  • Organizing neighbors around the issues they already care about

Strictly nonpartisan. We teach people how the process works and how to use it. We do not endorse candidates or parties.

Neighbors raising their hands around a table at a civic leadership workshop.

Community Building

Neighbors into a network. A neighborhood into a home.
  • Learning hubs with tutoring, literacy, and enrichment, in the Rosenwald tradition
  • Welcoming spaces for meetings, events, and mutual support
  • Celebration of local culture, history, and story
  • A community-ownership model — residents help lead and sustain the work

Built to last: a hub the neighborhood governs does not close when a grant cycle ends.

Students and a tutor working together around a table at a community learning hub.

Why this model

We are reviving something that already worked here

Between 1912 and 1932, Black communities across the South — including Tennessee — put up their own money, land, and labor to build nearly five thousand schools with Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald. The outside contribution was a match. The community's own investment is what unlocked it, and what made those schools belong to the people who attended them.

When those schools went away, the communities around them declined. The RDE Community Initiative revives that model — a common curriculum of gardening, civil rights, and community building, carried by the neighborhood that owns it.

Community firstResidents invest time, talent, and leadership.
Partners matchOutside support multiplies what neighbors put in.
Neighbors own itThe work is governed and sustained locally.
Three farmers on tractors working a field together under a darkening sky.
Three tractors, one field. Cooperation was never complicated here — it was ordinary.

The story underneath this work

A farmer was plowing his field with a storm coming in. He was not going to finish, and every farmer knows what a tractor in a wet field means. He never asked anyone for help.

The farmer across the road came anyway. Then a third drove his tractor two miles after the second sent word. The field got finished. The founder of this initiative watched it happen as a child, and has been carrying it ever since.

That is the whole idea. Cultural reclamation, cultural continuity, cultural elevation — remembering how our people already knew to live, and choosing it again on purpose.

Whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister. Mark 10:43, KJV

Dr. King called it the drum major instinct. Our elders just called it being a good neighbor. Service is the path to greatness here — not as sentiment, but as the operating instruction.

What success looks like

Four things we are working toward

These are goals, not claims. They are how we will know this is working, and how you can hold us to it.

Fresh food within reach Every family in the neighborhood with real access to fresh, healthy food.
New local leaders A rising generation of confident leaders who choose to lead here.
Students thriving Learning hubs where students get help, get seen, and get ahead.
Owned by the community Neighbors who lead, sustain, and own the work — not an audience for it.

Get involved

Find your part

None of this works without the people who live here. Pick the group that sounds like you, and start with one thing.

Your neighborhood, your power

For middle school students
  • Join a garden club, plant seeds, and take food home
  • Come to a learning hub for homework help and something fun after
  • Bring a friend — more hands, more harvest
  • Ask a parent or teacher to help you sign up

Every big garden starts with one seed. Be the seed.

Sign up with a grown-up
Three young students standing together in a garden.

About

Who is behind this

Rodney Dotson was born and raised in an agricultural farming community in rural West Tennessee. It was what he observed and lived there that shaped the initiative presented here.

An engineer's discipline, a neighbor's instinct

Mr. Dotson is an early-retired engineer and STEM educator who has redirected his career toward community consulting, nonprofit leadership, and market garden farming. He earned his chemical engineering degree at the University of Tennessee and a Master of Science in Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University, and completed professional development and graduate coursework in education and human development at Vanderbilt University's Peabody School, Rutgers University, and the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science.

Programs that worked before, applied here

He created and successfully implemented innovative STEM education programs for talented youth and families in New York and New Jersey — the Institute for High-Performance Learning, the Talent Development Network, and the Center for Quality in Urban Education — operating from within The City College of New York and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Across all of it, the work has been a service ministry: elevating culture and community development to the level of mutual service and genuine human development. Resource Development Empowerment Associates brings that same conviction home to Fayette County.

About the organization. The RDE Community Initiative is the community program of Resource Development Empowerment Associates, serving Somerville and Fayette County, Tennessee. Civic and voter education is offered on a strictly nonpartisan basis.

Partner with us. We work alongside congregations, schools, landowners, local business, and county partners. If your organization wants to match community investment here, see the ways to partner.

Take the next step

Tell us where you want to plug in

Whether you have two hours a month, an acre of unused land, a skill to teach, or a company that wants to match what neighbors are already putting in — start here. A real person reads every note.

  • Emailinfo@rdeassociates.org
  • Where we workSomerville · Fayette County, Tennessee
  • Volunteer & service hoursStudents, families, and groups are welcome at garden days and learning hubs.
  • Partners & sponsorsAsk about matching a garden site, a hub, or a program season.

This form opens your email program with your message ready to send. Prefer to write directly? Email info@rdeassociates.org.