GRAHAMTOWN TEAM
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Mission Statement
It is the mission of the Grahamtown Team to plan, support, educate, and execute opportunities to enrich the quality of life for the Grahamtown community.
About This Cause
The Grahamtown Team provides three major programs; Healthy Homes Community Revitalization, Health & Wellness, and youth projects and programs. Through these programs we have set extremely high goals to serve the majority African American community of Grahamtown in Forest City, NC. A community that has the oldest housing stock in the county, where more than 30% of the properties are abandoned, dilapidated or falling apart. Families are living in run-down, cinder block apartment housing, homeowner's need repair for their houses and many face mold and leaking roofs. Our residents are primarily elderly residents that would love to come outside, but we only have 2 streets with sidewalks and anyone walking down the streets typically walk in the middle of the road to ensure that they are seen. Our neighborhood needs more lighting, implementation of a streetscape plan to help beautify the community and to make it attractive to potential homebuyers and tourists. Our wellness program provides, fresh produce with each harvest to our residents, delivered by our staff and board members. We offer exercise classes at little, or no cost. We provide a food pantry to those in need of food and for over 18 years the Grahamtown Team has worked to make our community engaging and safe. We partner with the Town of Forest City Police, and they participate at our board meetings as a Police liaison, providing us with information, needs and issues within the community. Each month, prior to our board meeting, we host a community meeting, open to all of our residents and the public. During these meetings we communicate to the public our programs, our events and activities. We allow our residents to speak their concerns, to give their feedback and to give their input about what is needed in our community. We also get to hear from Town leaders, such as the mayor and police chief. The Grahamtown Team stands in need of funding just as every other nonprofit needs financial support, but we desire to develop and implement a plan to become self-sustaining, increase housing, engage our residents and beautify our community. Through this plan we provide projects such as Dignity Housing, homes that are built or renovated with those that are homeless or facing homelessness and after participating in 100 hours of sweat equity in building the home, they get to live in the home with a housemate for a period of time, that allows them to become stable and build up their income and work toward permanent housing. Along with the Dignity Housing project we will continue to build duplexes throughout the community, a youth and community space for seniors and youth to come together and beautify our community. All of this takes money. It takes almost $180,000 to build a new home and approximately $60,000 to renovate a 2-bedroom home in our community. To contribute to these processes, we have already obtained many of the vacant lots to build upon, but our greatest challenges are that we typically can only build one home at a time and because it does not bring in the income fast enough to keep our projects going all at the same time, we have to try and do multiple projects. Therefore, we have concluded that we need the funds to build 3 - 4 homes, that will get us ahead and if we have the funds to builds these homes and put them on the market to sale, we will have income coming in faster via renting or selling. The income from the sale of these properties will help us to reinvest into the next project and the next project, without getting so low that we are not able to move forward on other projects.