Local Offerings
Our local offerings are rooted in a deep love for the South and a commitment to the places and people who shape it—especially here in Durham. Grounded in the city’s complex history and vibrant Black culture, these initiatives honor the resilience, creativity, and wisdom of African American communities while honestly engaging the systemic challenges that continue to shape daily life. Each local offering is an act of presence and care—like bringing a dish to a family cookout—designed to strengthen relationships, nurture belonging, and contribute to the shared wellbeing of the neighborhood. This is how we show up: attentive to place, accountable to community, and invested in cultivating a future where dignity, memory, and care are held together.
Neighborhood Projects
This 15-Year Neighborhood Plan (2025 - 2040) for the Grant Street Community was created through a deeply collaborative process grounded in local wisdom, community expertise, and proven facilitation practices. Guided by Durham-based community development leader Mamie Webb-Bledsoe, we used the Technology of Participation (ToP) Consensus Method—an approach that centers resident voice, shared leadership, and collective decision-making.
In partnership with leaders from Monument of Faith Church, the Grant Street Community, and neighbors who have stewarded this block for decades, we gathered stories, priorities, and visions for the future. The resulting plan reflects the community’s own hopes for safety, beauty, preservation, and belonging.
This document is not an outside proposal—it is the neighborhood’s vision, shaped by the people who call Grant Street home and supported by partners committed to its long-term flourishing.
Neighborhood Property Management (NPM) exists to serve Durham’s historic neighborhoods with care, integrity, and a long-term vision for stability and continuity. Rooted in the Grant Street Community within the historic Hayti District, this work grew out of relationship-based community development alongside legacy families, elders, and neighbors through BLK South. Our on-the-ground presence—listening to residents, walking properties, and supporting families through moments of transition—revealed a consistent need for property management that was both professional and deeply grounded in community values.
NPM responds to that need by prioritizing the protection of legacy homes, supporting long-time residents, and helping families plan for long-term stability through attentive property care, owner advocacy, estate support, and pathways toward community continuity. While informed by community development values, the company operates as a focused, professional property management firm under The Property Firm, LLC, a Durham-based, Black-owned real estate company, with experienced oversight and full regulatory compliance.
Seasonal Programming
Soulwork: A Community-Led Theological Lab
Soulwork is a space for seekers, questioners, and dreamers who long for something deeper—a place to wrestle honestly with faith, imagine new possibilities, and re-center spiritual life in ways that honor both personal story and collective history. Rooted in dialogue rather than lectures, Soulwork functions as a community-led theological lab where participants help shape the conversation, exploring themes like contemplation and grounding practices, reimagining spirituality for a changing world, learning from our stories and from creation, and discerning how to live faithfully in the present moment. Guided by the wisdom of Black theological voices such as Howard Thurman, Emilie M. Townes, James Cone, Willie Jennings, and others, this gathering invites curiosity, courage, and care—creating a space where harmful ideas can be named, life-giving ones can be cultivated, and people can be formed to listen, imagine, and live differently.
Healing Through Play is a trauma-informed program for youth that uses art, movement, and play to support emotional resilience, reduce stress, and cultivate joy, confidence, and connection. Grounded in the Encrucijadas Curriculum developed by Collective Tapestry, the program invites young people into embodied practices that help them process experiences, strengthen self-regulation, and build healthy relationships with themselves and others. Led by Kendall L. Dooley—a longtime youth mentor, ordained leader through Street Psalms, and trained practitioner in trauma-informed care—Healing Through Play brings together creative expression, somatic awareness, and culturally rooted practices to create a supportive environment where youth are seen, supported, and encouraged to grow.
Healing Through Play
The Land Speaks emerged from conversations with our friends at Durham Cares and Amplify Peace, as we dreamed about an offering for small groups from across the country who want to come to Durham to learn from the land. Rooted in the perspective of our great-great grandmother, Fannie Latta—who was displaced from Hayti in the early 20th century through Highway 147 and urban renewal—this pilgrimage centers Black memory, land, and lived experience. Designed for intimate cohorts of 10–15 people, participants are invited to walk, listen, reflect, and create in relationship with Hayti, while also attending to the land they come from and how it speaks in conversation with Durham. This is an embodied, reflective journey where history, place, and presence meet—and where the land itself becomes a teacher.