Cooperative Living Northern Virginia Electric • June 2020 • TAI CHI TEACHER1

Lonnie Calhoun III’s movements are slow and deliberate — every turn, every step, every hand movement.

They are the motions of battle — albeit, in this instance, he is as a Tai Chi instructor and they are the motions of low-impact exercise.

But his actions and speech are always just as measured, whether he’s teaching martial arts for self-defense or in a meeting. There is always something worthwhile to fight for.

“I’m trying to make meaning out of my life,” he says. “I keep asking myself, ‘How do I make meaning?’ I want to be a part of the community and the solution. I don’t want to be a bystander.”

The litany of organizations he works with is a recital of local good causes. He serves as the founder and principal facilitator of the Prince Edward County Literacy Council, vice president of the United Way of Prince Edward County, and is on the advisory board of the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts.

Calhoun is a member of the Farmville Chamber of Commerce. He has also served as the director of the Charlotte County Adult Learning Center and on the boards of directors of the Prince Edward Public School Endowment Fund, the Southside Virginia Family YMCA and the Robert Russa Moton Museum (featured in February’s Cooperative Living).

“I like giving to causes — not just the physical, but the financial is important too,” Calhoun says. Ultimately, he says, it is part of contributing to your world. And, indeed, Calhoun picks up a pertinent quote from civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”

Calhoun made a career promoting diversity, and it grew out of activism that taught him the need for involvement.

As a child in the small town of Vidalia, Ga., located in the south-central part of the state renowned for its namesake onions, he participated in the local civil rights movement.

The family moved to Michigan and then to England before returning to Vidalia in the mid-1960s when Calhoun was in middle school.

The return “marked the beginning of my race consciousness,” he recalls. Calhoun ran into the culture and customs of the segregated South and was given what was a standard talk about how to interact, and not interact, with white people.

But times were changing and his father made sure he was part of it. First his brother and then Lonnie became part of school desegregation efforts. It wasn’t long before Calhoun and other students started traveling around protesting.

They were taught not to make eye contact. “Because when you made eye contact it became personal,” he says.

From October 1995 until 2010, Calhoun was Longwood University’s director of multicultural affairs and international student services. He used his office as a clearinghouse for “the broad range” of minority issues, be they religious pluralism or inclusion of minority students, including a rapid increase in Chinese students at the time.

Calhoun’s post-Longwood career is as president and CEO of Cal-Lon LLC: the Intercultural Professionals, the Education Specialist. The company provides strategy, evaluation and capacity-building services to foundations, nonprofit organizations, small colleges and corporate community involvement programs. He is also a senior consultant with the Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm.

It was poetic that he ended up in Prince Edward County, where local officials closed public schools from 1959 to 1964 rather than desegregate.

The area’s history is part of the motivation and need for his work with the literacy council, a passion project. He prompted the creation of the council a few years ago out of concern that nothing was being done to help adults from being left behind or marginalized because they were unable to read.

He has been the point person in organizing the council, its primary contact and chaired its monthly meetings in the more-than-a-year-long effort. He’s fighting, seemingly in slow motion, to get it done.