Hearts Open! A Message from Our CEO
I hope you are living well as we wrap up 2023 with family and friends. This year, a group of long-time Board and staff, with deep knowledge of both the neighborhood and Metanoia’s uniqueness, gathered to refine the primary language we use to talk about our work together. The new mission, vision, and values language is on pages 4-5 of our new 2023 Annual Report. All of the language has deep meaning, but the phrase I find most personally valuable is Metanoia’s new vision statement which says that our vision is to “live in a community where hearts are open to all that is possible and achievable.”
Homeownership remains the leading way that working families build wealth and stability. Metanoia seeks to build new homes and renovate abandoned houses for first-time homeowners.
In more than 20 years of doing this work alongside Chicora and surrounding Black neighborhoods, I have come to understand keeping our hearts open is THE most important task upon which all our other successes are built. Increasingly, we live in a world where closing our hearts off from one another (and what is possible) is becoming the default position. It is not without reason that someone might choose that course of action. There are so many frustrations and misconceptions as we deal with one another. And there are so many barriers in grassroots community development that it would be easy, rational even, to become frustrated and bitter. To close one’s heart off from possibilities is to play it safe and avoid the pain of disappointment.
As we have grown, we are blessed to have a fantastic team of staff and Board members at Metanoia who make amazing things happen. I can remember a day when my wife, Evelyn, and I were the only two staff working for Metanoia. Now, there are a host of us. While at some point in our history, I had to do most of the jobs here, I now have the pleasure of seeing a diverse group of people doing those jobs much better than I ever could. So, what is my work now that we have reached this stage? I find that my number one task is working to create the ground in myself and others that allows our hearts to stay open amidst the difficult and challenging work that we are called to do alongside the community.
Charleston has a long and often repeated history of offering predominantly Black communities two bad options; either living in run-down neighborhoods or being pushed out of those same neighborhoods as they rapidly gentrify. This history seems to be threatening to repeat itself in North Charleston now. It would be easy to let this repeated story discourage us, but living with hearts open means partnering with people to keep providing options that will keep the neighborhood more diverse and affordable for years to come. This year we finished the eight-unit Golden Dream Townhomes and three new homes for first-time homeowners. We renovated 15 homes for homeowners on a low fixed income and acquired 12 additional parcels of land for future affordable homeownership housing. Hearts open!
Education has become a territory that is increasingly fraught, with adults bickering over their own agendas without too much concern for children. I’m pleased to say that we’ve been able to steadily grow our youth programming over the past year and in 2024 we hope to meet, and then exceed, the numbers we were serving before the pandemic. Working with young people grades 1-12 helps keep all our hearts open at Metanoia. They are always learning and evolving if only we can provide them the opportunities to do so. We were fortunate at this year’s Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School (our first since the pandemic) to have 94% of students either gaining (82.4%) or maintaining (11.7%) their reading levels over the critical summer months according to pre and post-testing. 95% of Freedom School’s parents also reported that they would be more involved in their child’s schoolwork in the year ahead because of Freedom School. It is amazing what good things can begin to grow when students are encouraged to celebrate learning alongside their culture and history in a positive (and not politicized) light! Hearts open!
Metanoia’s Freedom School is staffed primarily by college students and recent college graduates, with a 10:1 child to adult ratio. As a result, many youth make significant gains in reading achievement and don’t experience any summer learning loss.
The work of keeping our hearts open also came in very handy as we reached a successful resolution around an insurance claim for a fire that interrupted our effort to renovate the historic Old Chicora School. Going through the insurance claims and lawsuit process seemed to be a wringer tailor-made to shut one’s heart down to future possibilities. But thanks in no small part to the fantastic help of attorneys Mark Joye and Jamie Kahn who provided us stellar representation, Metanoia finally reached an equitable settlement with the insurance company in the summer of 2023. (Special thanks as well to Mayor Keith Summey, who was also particularly helpful on the final day of settlement negotiations as well!) We spent the rest of the year solidifying partnerships and starting initial demolition on the fire-damaged portions of the building. We will continue to solidify partnerships in early 2024 and hope to close on financing and begin construction in early 2025 on this transformational community project. Hearts way, WAY open!
In the midst of this work, we also collaborated with community partners to reach a new agreement with the South Carolina State Ports Authority that will result multiple benefits, including more affordable housing and a new gymnasium for the neighborhood. We continued our after-school programming and support of Black entrepreneurs along Reynolds Avenue. We also partnered with the Urban Electric Company to create good jobs accessible to local residents (with 132 such jobs created over the past five years). Five fantastic moms within the community were identified and trained in leadership and advocacy through Metanoia's partnership with the National Women’s Law Center. The partnership resulted in occasions like this one, where Metanoia parent, Christine Matthews, was able to tell her story to Forbes Magazine or National Public Radio in a way that can educate and inspire others to action. And, we celebrated 20 years of working with hearts open at a Jubilee Luncheon in September where we premiered a summary video of all our work together.
None of the work of 2023 gets accomplished if we don’t live with our hearts open to what is possible and achievable. Without open hearts, we would have given up long before now. So many of the accomplishments above had multiple moments where it seemed like everything might fall apart, and that the rational thing to do would be to close our hearts off to what might be possible. But as we keep our hearts open, amazing things begin to be birthed among us. I’ve seen Metanoia’s COO Jamilla Harper, for example, go from being a college intern in our Freedom School a few years back to being recognized as one of 40 leaders under 40 to know in Charleston and a South Carolina Liberty Fellow just this year. Metanoia was further recognized by the Charleston Metro Chamber as its Community Impact Champion for 2023!
I confess that if I had heard the phrase “hearts open” when we started our work in 2002, I might have smirked and thought it too touchy-feely, too soft a phrase to work for me. But the work of the past 20+ years has taught me that there are few forces in nature that can rival a passionate human with a commitment to keep her or his heart open amidst all the challenges of life. Living with hearts open is the fine silk that runs through all our work – making us flexible and yet stronger than steel when we add our collective efforts together. Living with hearts open also takes real work if it is to be done over the long haul. One analogy I find helpful is that of a farmer tending to a plot of ground. We can’t control every circumstance that comes our way, but by nurturing the ‘soil’ underlying our open hearts and pruning weeds that threaten to close those hearts off, we can create good ground. We can be known as a movement where people’s hearts are open through the ups and downs of community development. Farming is hard work and so is nurturing the ground that enables us to live with open hearts.
As this year winds to a close, I am thankful that so many of you have kept your hearts open to Metanoia and our mission. November and December are our leading months for giving and we are grateful this year to have an anonymous donor whose own open heart has offered up a challenge grant of $100,000 to match your giving 1 to 1. Thank you to so many of you who have supported our work this year! For those who have not, you can click here to make a gift.
2024 is shaping up to be a significant year for Metanoia, with the expansion of our programming and projects in every sector of our efforts alongside the community. As we continue forward, I know there will be unexpected challenges bringing both victories and failures. What remains most important through it all is that we stay faithful to our vision to “live in a community where hearts are open to all that is possible and achievable.”
Thank you for being a part of this open-hearted community!
Peace,
Rev. Bill Stanfield
CEO