If you walked by Chapel Hill St. in Durham last Monday night you might have heard the CEF Advocacy Choir singing out before a crowd of over 100 attendees! You might have seen CEF Member Steven handing CEF Co-director, Maggie an oversized check, a donation to CEF for $500! You could have stepped into and heard Advocates and Members sharing their stories and how they’ve become apart of a transformative community at CEF. The 2nd Annual Piggy Bank Bash hosted by GRUB Durham, and was a night to be remembered and held in our minds-eye as we seek out love and joy in community.
Thank you so much to everyone that came out to eat and sing and celebrate CEF Members and the amazing community we are a part of! We are so thankful for the amazing support from Grub Durham to all the Members and Advocates and Board Members that came out to volunteer their time, to Erick for his amazing work on the mural, and to Local Yogurt, The Cookery, and Pauli Murray Project for donating raffle prizes!
Congratulations to Donna Carrington, CEF’s Housing Stabilization Specialist for winning the Humanitarian Service Award from Duke Chapel!
“As a change agent and a dedicated champion, Donna has worked tirelessly with Members to navigate crises, access resources, budget, repair credit, save money and build stability. She brings her full self with authenticity and courage, often drawing from the depths of her own experiences to offer support to others as they walk their own paths!”
Read more about the award and the amazing work that Donna does here: https://today.duke.edu/2017/10/duke-chapel-service-award-goes-2-durham-community-leaders
CEF matched savings accounts support Members in reaching goals all along the continuum from homelessness to homeownership! We launched a new program in 2016 to support first-time homebuyers with Reinvestment Partners and the Duke Homebuyers Club.
Paige was one of the first 5 CEF Members to successfully purchase their own home! Paige worked incredibly hard and with amazing focus to reach her goal in just ten months. In addition to her full-time job at Duke, she worked extra jobs in order to stay on track with her financial goals. She participated in CEF’s Financial Coaching program and was able to pay off debts and improve her credit score, qualifying her for an affordable mortgage. Meanwhile, she successfully saved for her down payment and closing costs, receiving a dollar-for-dollar match from CEF!
Paige is proud to be a homeowner. Some of the best parts? Her mortgage payment is actually cheaper than her rent payments were, and she is building an asset for the long term!
When: Monday, November 6th, 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Where: GRUB Durham, the newest restaurant by Durham-based restaurateurs Wendy Woods and Stacey Poston
Ticket Price: $30
Ticket price includes admission to the event, a delicious dinner (including a meatball bar with vegan options!), and one drink ticket
Join us on Monday, November 6th to support the innovative work of the Community Empowerment Fund through a fundraiser hosted by GRUB Durham. This will be a night of education, food, drink, and camaraderie. There will be ample opportunities to learn about CEF’s work and mission at the event, while meeting CEF members, supporters, West End neighbors, and more.
100% of the ticket proceeds benefit CEF. Purchase tickets here. The GRUB Durham team looks forward to celebrating and supporting CEF’s continuing work with you!
About CEF: CEF supports over 1,000 Members in Durham and Orange Counties experiencing homelessness or financial insecurity to gain jobs, secure housing, and build savings. Founded in 2009, CEF coordinates hundreds of trained volunteer Advocates, primarily from area universities, to work alongside CEF Members towards achieving their personal goals. Click here to learn more about CEF and read stories from CEF’s Members and Advocates.
Can’t make it to the party?
Sponsor a ticket for a CEF Member / Advocate! (mention Piggy Bank Bash in a comment!)
Christina and Rudy were homeless for three years, supporting each other for safety and survival while living in a tent and simultaneously making incredible strides towards stability. Through CEF and a church called Love Chapel Hill, Christina and Rudy found community and a supportive base from which to pursue employment and transition out of homelessness.
As of May of 2017, they have been off the streets and employed for two full years. Rudy shares, “I think the fact that I was in a house really established me in the workforce.” Christina adds, “I have a full-time job, and I love knowing that when I get off I can come home, sleep in a bed and actually have food that I like that I cook.”
And beautifully, Christina and Rudy just got married! At the ceremony, Rudy made his vows not only to Christina, but to her kids as well. They have amazing plans for their whole family. Rudy shares, “We both want to go back to college…get me a better job, get her some transportation, buy us a house, and then we can look into expanding our family.”
Jess Mcdonald joined CEF’s Durham team as Advocate Program Coordinator in June of 2017, and we are so thankful for them!
I heard about the Advocate Program Coordinator position opening at CEF, and it seemed like the organization’s values, analysis, and visions of change aligned with my own. I’m really interested in doing social justice work that addresses both the day-to-day experiences of individuals and the larger systems that perpetuate inequalities. I’m passionate about doing this work in the South and in my home state of North Carolina in particular. Durham is where I want to plant my roots, and it’s where I’ve found a really strong community of people who are engaged in social justice work. The city has a really rich history, and so many of the struggles today around affordable housing and other issues are deeply connected to this history. I also have a background in social justice education with college students, and I’m really interested in bridging the town and gown divide between Durham and Duke in intentional ways. CEF really brings together several of my passions, and I’m so excited to be joining the team.
I feel like life, at its essence, is about connecting with people. Especially within social justice work, it’s all about the relationships we form within communities. So often the systems of power, privilege, and oppression are set up to prevent us connecting on a deep level and building that solidarity across difference. Transforming the world starts with transforming ourselves and our relationships with each other. Changing communities starts with one-on-one connections
My relationships with other people are what keeps me grounded and what reminds me why I do this work. We aren’t doing this work in a bubble, and it has real impacts on real people. In that way, connecting with people is also about accountability. Getting feedback about where we’re falling short, where we can grow, and what we need to be thinking more intentionally about is critical to doing meaningful work. Building that trust and communication is all based on relationships.
I’m from the coast of North Carolina, Morehead City. It’s a pretty small town. I went to Elon University, which is about 40 minutes from Durham, and I got involved in social justice work as a student there. When I was in college, I would come to Durham occasionally, and I also had friends from Durham. I studied history and sociology, and I did an undergraduate thesis about the history of LGBTQ life at Duke and UNC, so I spent a summer living in Durham and working in the archives in the Center of Gender and Sexual Diversity at Duke. After school, I worked at an LGBTQ non-profit that served college students across the country. After a year or so of working there, I went to grad school at UMass Amherst and got a degree in Social Justice Education, with a focus on intergroup dialogue. I came back to Durham for a little over a year, taught at NC Governor’s School for a couple of summers, and then spent the past year in a fellowship in Asheville. I worked at Our VOICE, a rape crisis center, assessing their services and making suggestions for how they could better serve the LGBTQ community. That was a year-long position that just ended, and I really wanted to come back to Durham, so I’m glad I found CEF.
It may sound corny, and I feel like I keep talking about social justice, but seeing people coming together for a common cause in hard times like the ones we’re in is very inspiring to me. Whether that’s in response to things like HB2, police violence, gentrification, etc., seeing people come together and fight back against these systems is really inspiring. If you think about it, we are really resilient and powerful people, and getting together with folks to remind ourselves of that is really important for sustaining this work. I also look to history for inspiration, especially social movement ancestors like Leslie Feinberg or Audre Lorde or Marsha P. Johnson. To see yourself as part of that arc of history and understand that the generations that come after us will continue this work is really humbling.
There’s just so much work to do in Durham in general, and at CEF, too. The city is changing so quickly, and we need to be one step ahead in making that growth sustainable for everyone, especially when it comes to affordable housing. Managing all of the Advocates and working to be as efficient as we can with our time, while also centering the importance of building meaningful relationships throughout the organization, is going to be a challenge, but I’m excited to take it on.
I’m really excited to co-teach the house course at Duke this fall. It’s been a year or so since I’ve been in a classroom, and I miss it. I’m kind of a nerd when it comes to pedagogy and facilitation. I love creating spaces for people to explore new topics and have critical conversations that they may not get to have in other parts of their lives. I guess it goes back to the idea of consciousness raising and transforming ourselves in order to transform the world. It’s a lofty goal, but we’ve got to start somewhere. The house course seems like a really amazing opportunity to combine social justice education, community-based work, and structured time for continued reflection to inform that work.
