We are a Black women-led community organization and social enterprise, and we are restructuring into a formidable institute for relational repair, community wealth, and cultural sovereignty.
See what we're buildingCommunity is who we are.Community is what we do.
For nearly 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 ten years, 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. New governance. 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; 1,200–2,400 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.
Built with City of Durham transportation officials since 2015, this work led to the Hayti Community Healing Plan, known in placeholder language as the Durham Marshall Plan, greenlighted unanimously by Durham City Council on March 23, 2023. It is how Hayti One Voice CDC, our community member led development corporation, came into being.
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 did the work and activated the first two. The project was stalled by systemic barriers and funding setbacks. We are restructuring to resume it.
The remaining three sites will be activated through our community development corporation, Hayti One Voice CDC, culminating in the first annual Hayti Community Carnival, 2030.
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.
Fund Black women-led community wealth and cultural sovereignty.
Bring The Be Connected Method to your institution or initiative.
Come to Third Friday, Juneteenth, and our community experiences.
Learn about the Business Viability and Guaranteed Income cohorts.
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, in community.
Named a founding architect of Durham's Equitable Community Engagement Blueprint by Johns Hopkins University's SNF Agora Institute (2021). M.Ed., Cambridge College · Teaching Artistry Certificate, NCCU · M.A. Liberal Studies (in progress), Duke University.