Be Connected Durham & Beyond is a Black women-led nonprofit rooted in community, arts, and culture. Small and mighty, we are restructuring our frameworks into what we have always been: a formidable institute for relational repair, community-wealth building, and cultural sovereignty.
See what we're buildingCOMMUNITY IS WHO WE ARE.COMMUNITY IS WHAT WE DO.
For over a decade, we've connected people to what's most often missing: each other.
Recognized by Johns Hopkins University's SNF Agora Institute as a national model for equitable community engagement.
For over a decade, this work has lived underground. Nimble, trusted, and proven. Cities adopted our frameworks. Institutions documented our impact. Communities knew our name.
Now we are building the structure to protect it, scale it, and carry it forward with integrity. A flagship economic initiative. Protected intellectual property. A permanent home on the Fayetteville Street Corridor.
This restructure is not a pivot. It is a homecoming. We are becoming the institution our community has always deserved. Built from the inside out, on our own terms, field-tested by community, in community.
A Black women-led community wealth and economic sovereignty initiative. We fund viability, not hustle. We pair direct capital with relational repair to build durable, generational wealth where it has been most denied.
Our proprietary, artistically prescriptive design method, space programming, accesses the abstract elements and liminal space that traditional process, policy, and programming miss. Every experience is built through six dimensions of human presence as instruments of collective transformation.
A week-long, neighborhood-centered Juneteenth celebration uniting Durham's historic African American communities. Six years of City proclamations; 1,200 - 2,600 attendees per event.
LIVE! From the FSC began in 2020 and drew a crowd of 1,200 to our first Hayti neighborhood Juneteenth celebration, with 22 vendors generating roughly $800 an hour across five hours. A product of the FSC Fellows Project.
Community members trained in equitable engagement and storytelling as data. The people who know the Corridor because they live it, in the room when decisions about it are made.
A play on words for Equitable Engagement, Everybody Eats is our food sovereignty initiative and part of the FSC Fellows Project. During COVID-19, it became a food distribution model documented by Johns Hopkins University.
Our collaborative work with Durham planning and transportation officials began in 2016, culminating in the historic Hayti Community Healing Plan (Durham Marshall Plan), which the City Council approved unanimously on March 23, 2023. This milestone catalyzed the launch of our resident-led development corporation, Hayti One Voice (HOV). In response to shifting political dynamics, we are restructuring HOV in 2026 to reclaim absolute autonomous leadership. This strategic pivot ensures our development initiatives remain entirely community-driven and supported by trusted inclusive economy organizations, independent of municipal oversight.
A long-arc plan to activate five historic sites along the Fayetteville Street Corridor as permanent community anchors, restoring the heart of historic Hayti. From 2020 to 2024, we activated the first two. The remaining three were charted to follow through Hayti One Voice. Then, amid shifting political dynamics, the path forward changed.
Living anchors, owned and tended by the community they serve. Places to make, to remember, and to grow, built from the inside out on ground we hold ourselves.
A live-work home where movement artists root their relational repair, conflict resolution, base-building practice in Hayti. Movement artists make with the neighborhood, not about it.
A keeping-place for Hayti's story, record, and memory, in relationship with movement and grassroots artists so the work can never again be separated from its Source.
Ground named for a foremother of Black story and folkway, tended as a place of gathering and growth.
Ground named for a visionary of Black futures, planted as proof that we build what we imagine.
Traditional nonprofit boards reproduce the patriarchy and supremacy culture that have harmed Black communities. So we built something new: three interlocking councils, each with distinct cultural and functional authority, unified under a founding covenant.
Wisdom, vision, and cultural integrity. Holds the long memory. Protects the root.
Community accountability and cooperative governance. Drawn from and answerable to the communities we serve.
Policy governance, legal and financial integrity. Sets ends and boundaries that protect the work.
Creative Strategist, Conceptual Teaching Artist, and Founding Visionary of Be Connected Durham & Beyond. For over a decade, she has built civic, cultural, and economic infrastructure that cities have adopted and institutions have documented, developing The Be Connected Method and BE WELL™ from a decade of practice field-tested by community.