Serve & Connect Announces Lead Community Organizer

We are proud to announce hiring Omari Fox full-time as our Lead Community Organizer. Mr. Fox has worked with Serve & Connect since January 2020. Mr. Fox has served as a leader within the North Columbia Youth Empowerment Initiative since joining the steering committee in April 2019.

Community artist and organizer Omari Fox comes to the Serve and Connect family with a long résumé of civic engagement, classroom expertise, and cultural arts campaign experience from a 20 year long organizing career that is still growing. As a trained sociologist and graduate of South Carolina State University, Omari brings a unique creative consciousness to the lens of community relationship building. Also a graduate of Benedict College, Omari was thrust into the organizing spotlight as an art education major during his days as the President of the Benedict College Art Intelligentsia (BCARTI). That was the proving ground where he learned to transform creative language, imagery, and emotion in order to meld those lanes into consciousness, vision, and strategy for people empowerment.

As an advocate for the dignity and humanity of marginalized communities, Omari believes that community engagement through our collective gifts and talents is a key ingredient to Serve and Connect. Community experience has taught him to power-map those collective skills and apply them to all of the roles we play in community from the guardian peace officers, to the everyday residents striving to prosper and provide for their families. Omari is a firm believer in co-creating that vision together with the community’s consent and voice front and center beginning with deep listening and it is an organizer’s job to see, hear, and support the people in that partnership.

“In the beginning of my justice work I only showed up as the creative person offering solutions and strategy within the framework of my expression. At some prodigious moment the people insisted that I apply the poetic strategy into concrete action steps. As an educator it was easy to see the ability in others and create a classroom environment to foster that development. Now the landscape is the neighborhood and it’s about lifting up people and places that feel unseen and unheard then going to their table to get them connected instead of always inviting them to ours.”

Omari is the proud son of Allan and Barbara Fox who both transitioned in September of 2018.