Tali Hairston

Director of the Perkins Center, Special Assistant to the President
(tali@spu.edu )

Tali Hairston came to SPU in 2001 as assistant director of campus ministries. Now at the helm of the John Perkins Center for Reconciliation, Leadership Training, and Community Development, he is leading Seattle Pacific in a comprehensive initiative born out of a dream and a partnership between President Philip Eaton and the legendary reconciliation advocate Dr. John Perkins. He wants to see SPU contribute to the reconciliation movement in Seattle and the nation.

W. Tali Hairston is the father of a son and two daughters, and husband of 11 years to Romanita Sherelle, vice president of U.S. National Programs for World Vision.

Born and raised in Seattle’s ethnically diverse Ranier Valley, Tali received his first leadership position at the age of 16 through his uncle’s church. After graduating from the University of Washington, he left corporate work to become the youth pastor of an urban outreach youth ministry called Exodus in Seattle’s Rainier Valley.

 

Through Exodus, Tali and his wife, Romanita, developed a relational ministry to a wide array of urban youth using tutoring, outreach camps, and high school campus outreach. While doing this, he worked in a residence home for boys, where he learned how desperate the mental, emotional, and sexual health of America’s youth had become. With this experience, he branched out and began equipping other leaders in urban youth outreach and community development through a World Vision program called Vision Youth.

After completing the three-year training grant from World Vision in 1998, he found many of the systemic and historic challenges facing the urban community birthing a passion in him for understanding global urban leadership, reconciliation, and community development. Upon accepting the position as Urban Ministry Advisor for Seattle Pacific University’s Campus Ministries, he was asked to assist the University in its new Reconciliation and Diversity Initiative as the special assistant to the president of the university, Philip W. Eaton, Ph.D.

Then in 2003, his life changed when President Eaton and Dr. John M. Perkins of Jackson, Mississippi, asked him to lead a new partnership. This partnership would grow to become the John M. Perkins Center for Reconciliation, Community Development, and Leadership Training. The center is a first of-its-kind partnership uniquely impacting the University, the Pacific Northwest, and beyond as a champion for reconciliation and community development.

As a bridge-builder, scholar-practitioner, speaker, and advisor, Tali contributes to strategic organizational partnerships and community-based programming for a variety of Christian ministries. But the heart of his work is advancing the message and ministry of reconciliation and community development.

As a lecturer and teacher, Tali challenges the next generation of leaders, churches, schools, development organizations, and Seattle Pacific University. He has traveled throughout South and Central Africa and Southeast Asia, exploring the implications of reconciliation and global urban community development.

The powerfully transformative stories of great Christian leaders such as John M. Perkins have become the filter by which he sees the world. But it is also Tali’s story. The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White by Henry Wiencek, is the story of one of the largest slave-holding families in American history. It is the historic struggle of his family and their journey to transcend the past by embracing their story.

Many African Americans do not know their family story and that is important. Tali says he is blessed to have known the story of his great-great grandfather and grandmother and their life in West Virginia and the role race, religion, poverty, and politics plays in the life of so many in America and around the world. This truly motivates him to be and become the reconciliation advocate for the next generation.

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