Theresa Watson has a passion for helping young people get to college – and that passion doesn’t stop in the classroom. When she noticed that the youth she mentored often showed up hungry, she began to prepare extra food for them. “I just take pans of food over there so the kids can eat…if they got hungry they had no …

Stephanie Terry is a lifelong community organizer, who has devoted herself to addressing racial inequities. As the Founding Organizer for Justice United in Community Effort, she worked to address issues like affordable housing, transportation, and livable wages, but it wasn’t until attending a training from the Racial Equity Institute that she began to see that none of those issues could …

As a resident of Chapel Hill for nearly forty years, Ms. Karen Reid dedicated herself to addressing the inequality that persists in the local school system today. She started noticing disparities in educational opportunity and treatment when she worked as a classroom teacher for the Chapel Hill Carrboro City Schools, and took it upon herself to address the issues with …

From a young age, Ms. Juanita Alston was taught the difference between right and wrong. Her father was a minister, and her mother impressed on her the importance of treating everyone with compassion and generosity. With these incredible role models, Ms. Alston rose her voice to challenge segregation, and as a teenager, joined the blossoming civil rights movement in Chapel …

Although Anna Richards came to Chapel Hill later in life, she has been a major organizing force for equality in the community. As president of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP, Richards has pushed the organization to advocate for education equality, police reform, voter education and a number of other issues affecting marginalized groups locally. Ms. Richards was raised with a commitment …

Collene R. Rogers grew up in Chapel Hill, and remembers the walkouts staged by Lincoln High School students to protest their under-resourced science labs. In 1965 she moved north to take a job with B. Altman & Company in the accounting department. In April of 1968 she accepted a job with First National City Bank in New York City from …

Alice Battle always knew she wanted to be a teacher. “I didn’t take education just in case. ‘Cause I always wanted to be a teacher. My sister was a teacher, Aunt Frances was a teacher, Aunt Pearl was a teacher. I had all those role models and I wanted to be a teacher too.” Inspired by the women who came …

Bonita Joyce started organizing around community education when she came to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill as a freshman. She became involved with a group of students interested in creating a community-based program about Black history and culture. In 1992 the group formed the Communiversity Youth Program, a Saturday school aimed to educate, empower and expose youth to …