Meet our Fellows

Ronnie Farmer: I Have a Dream Preschool Academy

Marion, Indiana

Rooting Children in Racial Justice and Understanding

A global pandemic does not offer ideal conditions for opening a new preschool, but Rev. Ronnie Farmer and his team felt a clear call to do just that.

“We started the school during COVID because, in the midst of a global pandemic, we also felt there was a racial pandemic. We felt the season of our country demanded that we open our school. So we launched on faith. We felt a really clear call to open the Dream Academy,” said Founder and Executive Director, Rev. Ronnie Farmer.  “When we opened up in year one, because of COVID, we literally had seven kids for an entire year. We have 25 now with a waiting list. “ 

The I Have a Dream Preschool Academy in Marion, Indiana is a “language immersion early childhood education program, whose mission is to cultivate a love for self, a love for God, and a love for one’s neighbor within the hearts of children.”  As the only multi-ethnic, language-immersion preschool in the city, the center has created a learning community that teaches racial reconciliation and global citizenry through age appropriate activities and leadership modeling. The teaching staff is diverse and most are native Spanish speakers. Some teachers are immigrants themselves. “When the children come in each week, every one of them can see someone in leadership who looks like them,” said Farmer.

“Marion, Indiana was the site of one of the last lynchings in North America. Marion is the town Billie Holiday sang about in Strange Fruit,” said Farmer.  Strange Fruit is a song recorded by Holiday in 1939 that protests the lynchings of Black Americans.

“There’s a dark racial past here, but Marion was also part of the Underground Railroad and has a redemptive history as well - Quakers and Wesleyans working together to help Black men and women escaping slavery make it up north.”  

Farmer and his team felt committed to working toward proactive, rather than reactive, racial reconciliation and knew that child poverty was another issue in their city which needed to be addressed. Grant County has the highest child poverty rate of the 92 counties in Indiana.

The two issues came together when Farmer, an ordained ABC pastor and executive pastor at REAL Community Covenant Church, and members of his church attended the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) conference in 2018 where they were challenged to think strategically about investment in the community and local neighborhood. 

“Dominique Gilliard, Director of Racial Righteousness and Reconciliation for the Love Mercy Do Justice Initiative of the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) said “We have until children turn seven to reorient the way they see their neighbor.” He gave some data and statistics around racial formation bias. And it was as if, when he was talking, a light bulb went off in my heart,” said Farmer.

 Farmer began to look at more research around the development of racial bias within children and discovered  “If you can put a child in a space that is multi-ethnic, multi-class, not just among their peers, but even among the leadership they see, you can reorient the way the child sees their neighbor and really help that child to grow up without some of the biases that cause harm as they walk into adulthood, which is pretty significant.  

One of the things that we committed to from the beginning was that we wanted to be intentional about building a multi-ethnic, multi-class team. So that any child who came into the Dream Academy could look up and see someone who looked like them in leadership.”

The language immersion component is also research based.  “We discovered from our research that whenever a child studies a target language, they naturally develop a strong sense of empathy for the people group whose language they study.” 

“Learning a second language also helps in a world that has become more globalized. And so we added Spanish Immersion to our preschool, with the hopes that we could really give children the basic building blocks to become bilingual.”

The preschool hires teachers who are native Spanish speakers, some of whom are immigrants to the US who have had difficulty finding professional jobs. .

The Dream Academy began with grant funds from ECC through the Love Mercy, Do Justice program which focuses on social entrepreneurship and opportunities for churches. The preschool is registered with the State of Indiana, so families below a certain income level can receive vouchers for their children’s education.

About Ronnie Farmer

Farmer grew up in South Augusta, Georgia and attended Augusta’s John S. Davidson Fine Arts Magnet School from grades 6-12.  “Walking down the hall and seeing leotards and violins was very formative for me as a young person. It took me out of the space I was in and really became an outlet for met to really see the ways I was shaped and gifted.”

While in high school, Farmer began attending church with his uncle and felt the call to re-shift his life. “I began to wrestle back and forth with becoming a mechanical engineer versus doing art, and, at the same time, started to feel a really strong call to go into ministry. For me becoming a mechanical engineer was a way to help provide some financial stability in our home, because my mom was a single parent. All the pastors I knew were poor. It probably took me about two or three years before I admitted to what I felt the Lord called me to do.”

Farmer earned a B.A. in Religion from Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.  “Berea was one of the first schools to educate Blacks and whites together in the south. I experienced the value of diverse relationships – it was a very formative experience. They make you room with somebody who’s from a different ethnic background. When I graduated, I had friends from countries all across the world and they had enhanced my perspective around friendship. The interactions with these friends made me realize that I had biases about people from different places in the world - even being an African American -  that I wasn’t aware of.”

Farmer went on to complete a M.A. in Worship and the Arts from Asbury Theological Seminary as one of only ten African American students there. While at Asbury, he experienced “very dreadful” incidents of racism and wrestled with the racial bias in his fellow seminarians. Farmer left Asbury committed to working toward racial understanding and reconciliation.

As an innovative visual artist, Farmer began to look at the way his art could be used to help people process trauma. He has since utilized art in his work as a pediatric chaplain in Atlanta, on an international missions team, and as an addictions counselor at a rescue mission. He employs creative arts into pastoral care encounters with both children and families in the form of art and music and uses art to provide lessons on racial understanding at the preschool. Farmer believes that the arts can provide a safe, nonthreatening space for processing trauma and grief and continues to be interested in the ways that art can serve as a vehicle for pastoral care. 

“I was doing art to talk about justice and reconciliation, and I really wanted to utilize the canvas and my paintbrush to call attention to the ways in which I understood that racial divide was impacting the church,” said Farmer. 

After his wife, Sarah Farmer, Ph.D, M.Div, was offered a job as an assistant professor of practical theology and community development at Indiana Wesleyan, the family, now with three children, moved to Marion, Indiana and Farmer began working with REAL Community Covenant Church, now home of the I Have A Dream Preschool Academy.

Farmer is the only African American male leading an early childhood education initiative in the city of Marion.

“Every month, we try to have at least two intentional conversations around race with children that are accessible, to help them to see their neighbor in the right way. We do a project called shades of brown, where children take paper-mache, and they get to reproduce a person through paper-mache who has their skin tone.

In our project, we center in brownness. We say that God has made all of us different shades of brown. Some people have a lot of brown skin. Other just a bit of brown. There’s a myth that children are color blind. But children very much do see color. They just don’t attach negative associations to it.”

The long term goal for the Dream Academy is to build the program out into elementary school. “It would give us significantly more time to shape and form children in a way that would make them peacemakers and give them the skill sets and resources to go out into the world and to have a strong love for their neighbor.” Currently the preschool includes children to age five. 

“If we had funding that could take our preschool through grade school, it would be a game changer, not just for us, but also for our city.”

Farmer’s interest in the intersection of art, justice and theology continues to inspire his work and his life.

“One of my prayers is that in my lifetime, I will see the desegregation of the church. And I really believe that the way in which that will happen will be initiatives that put people in proximity with people from different ethnic backgrounds.  

Our school is an intentional and practical response to addressing one of the greatest issues that churches face, and that is racism and racial divide.”

Profile by Anita Flowers