Sign Up for my Substack: https://diadesignsatl.substack.com/

That stench, the smell of sewage leaking from the second-floor bathroom of our two bedroom apartment into the kitchen cabinets -water soaking into the living room carpet and causing mold when I was eleven years old. Academic degrees, job titles, nothing will ever remove the stench of poverty.

I cannot forget completing an activity in a Sociology 101 course at Oglethorpe University during my second year. In this activity a student takes a situation dependent step up or step back, steps forward demonstrate privileged life-events like a parent with a four-year degree and steps backward demonstrating life-events like having an immediate family member that has been incarcerated. I found myself the second to the furthest back. It hit me again, the foul odor of molding carpet.

Until that exercise I dreamt of becoming a doctor and how that would provide the financial outcomes necessary for my family to break the cycle of poverty. However, I could not afford to live on campus. How could I ever manage medical school? While still questioning my career path, during my third year of college my family received a note stating that our apartment was under new management and they intended to demolish the complex.

While we searched for a new place to live, we spoke with neighbors gathered in front of the leasing office, everyone was furious and scared. Many relied on their children as interpreters as we parsed out our rights as tenants. I recall explaining to a child that his mother had the right to her deposit monies since the landlord violated the lease. We had been residents in this apartment for decades, we were not transient renters, we were not a monolith or some mystical cultural melting pot. This was a thriving community, rich in social capital, a community where we took care of one another.

Growing up poor, allows me to see connections and opportunities where others see an impossibility; where the city saw “blight,” I saw my childhood home.After we found a new home, I began to attend meetings about affordable housing and gentrification. All of my free time was spent volunteering for local nonprofits, especially the ones that had given me scholarships that had made it possible for me to attend college. One such nonprofit, Athena’s Warehouse, founded by current State House Representative Bee Nguyen, stood out in my memory. Long after leaving the high school program, she mentored me.Since I had seen my mentor start and run her own nonprofit as my colleagues and I began brainstorming about the issues in our community, I knew that we could start our own non-profit.  

In 2017, we formed Vecinos de Buford Hwy, an organization working with tenants across several small cities and two counties to educate them on their rights as tenants. We wanted people to feel dignified in their home and take ownership of their neighborhoods to promote the change they saw fit. I currently serve as the Executive Director of both Athena’s Warehouse and Vecinos de Buford Hwy. I did not require a medical degree to heal my community. I needed to learn how to uplift the gifts already in the community so that it could begin to heal itself.

Although I have helped to found a nonprofit, nonprofits represent one part of the multisector interdisciplinary approach towards social change. I could not wait to learn more about the role of private corporations and emerging financial technology which can fill in gaps that nonprofits cannot, while studying at Agnes Scott. For my community, social innovation is more than just a multidisciplinary think-tank charged with the task of ending systemic oppressions; it is, also, the essential vehicle which can steer us all towards freedom.  To me social innovation is about developing a world that works for everyone.

There are many days when my expertise is questioned where I am referred to as ill-fit for leadership due to my age, gender, and race. My Master of Arts in Social Innovation strengthened my business management skills and formalized my commitment to transforming my community. Although the smell of sewage leaking in my childhood home will never leave me, I believe things can change for the better. I am unafraid to pull up a chair to the tables where politicians are discussing change for my community. To be successful in changing outcomes for myself and my community then I must continue to seek the foundational knowledge of the principles of social entrepreneurship. I need to learn more about social policy and team-based problem solving to better convey the needs of my community to the world.

It’s an arduous journey for women and girls growing out of poverty in the United States. Many of us are tempted to surrender our freedom and thoughts to the first man willing to care for us and the children we feel prompted to give birth to as soon as we are able. There I was surrounded by an insurmountable peak of poverty with no idea how to apply for college, what to major in, or even how to make friends. There I was in high school trying not to be awkward, needing to be pretty, and feeling that I should just be smart instead. There I was convinced that a few workshops, a couple scholarships, some prom dresses and all the volunteer hours in the world couldn’t even scratch the surface of the needs that we faced at Cross Keys High School. There I was, dead wrong. 

Athena’s Warehouse (AW) did more than provide me with a scholarship that helped me to stay on campus my freshman year of college, or provide me with a fabulous senior prom dress that fit like a glove; Athena’s taught me about the magic that is born when women work together to solve social issues. There is something inexplicably powerful about transferring feminine energy back and forth in gossip, in song, in movement, in affirmations, and that power was made clear by this microscopic nonprofit organization called Athena’s Warehouse. Until I interacted with AW I thought that non-profit work was something that “the-old-rich&-white” did in their leisure to assuage guilt, or to hide money from the government, or to feel in control of one more thing in the world- like the lives of the “unfortunate.” But in those workshops after school I didn’t feel seen as “unfortunate” the volunteers looked at me and saw themselves reflected. 

Now at 29 years old I am the second Executive Director of Athena’s Warehouse, following in the footsteps of my mentor, former State House Representative, Bee Nguyen. I didn’t plan on becoming a social entrepreneur, if you had asked that inelegant mousy junior in high school version of me you would have heard her/my plans to become a physician/a neurologist… But I could not have known how deeply poverty would impact my collegiate experience leaving my family vulnerable to gentrification and me in a whirlpool of debt that impacts my family and life to this day. 

Thanks to Athena’s Warehouse, The Cross Keys Foundation, Sister Stroizer, Pastor Freeman, Elder Patrickson, Elder Houston, Sister Statham, Brother & Sister Britton, Sister Rhonda Madison,  Ms. Angela Tonn, Mrs. Tracy Vax, Mr. Jacob Eismier, Ms. Katrina Cole and my grandmother I made into college at the esteemed Oglethorpe University in the fall of 2012. I entered OU as a biology major with a pre-medical focus and picked up a minor in psychology along the way. I wasn’t ready for college at all. I was a mediocre writer and my math skills were nonexistent. I was especially ill prepared for the mental exhaustion and I would later realize in 2021 was “burn out.” It was  during my junior year of college that my family was displaced from our apartment complex and home of 15 years. 

I was working in the counseling department at the university that year and I was also working as an aftercare assistant at a private school in Decatur. I had never learned to drive so I would take a 1 hour bus ride there and back to work and campus. It was beyond exhausting and after I settled into this routine we received notice that we had 28 days to move. While we searched for a new place to live, we spoke with neighbors gathered in front of the leasing office, everyone was furious and scared. Many relied on their children as interpreters as we parsed out our rights as tenants. I recall explaining to a child that his mother had the right to her deposit monies since the landlord violated the lease. Most had been residents in this apartment for decades, we were not transient renters, we were not a monolith or some mystical cultural melting pot. This was a thriving community, rich in social capital, a community where we took care of one another. I was there on the move out day, we left behind a green honda accord and I saw the new house in Stone Mountain where my mother expected me to stay. I took the smallest room, my mother’s income wasn’t high enough on her own to get the place in her name, the lease was in my name. 

After we found a new home, I began to attend meetings about affordable housing and gentrification. All of my free time was spent volunteering for local nonprofits, especially the ones that had given me scholarships that had made it possible for me to attend college. One such nonprofit, Athena’s Warehouse, stood out in my memory and harbored a special place in my heart. It was where I had seen my mentor start and run her own nonprofit as my colleagues and I began brainstorming about the issues in our community. I knew that we could start our own non-profit.  

In 2017, we formed Vecinos de Buford Hwy, an organization working with tenants across several small cities and two counties to educate them on their rights as tenants. We wanted people to feel dignified in their home and take ownership of their neighborhoods to promote the change they saw fit. I served as the Executive Director of both Athena’s Warehouse and Vecinos de Buford Hwy during the 2020 pandemic. I did not require a medical degree to heal my community. I needed to learn how to uplift the gifts already in the community so that it could begin to heal itself. In 2020 Vecinos de Buford Hwy distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent assistance to over 100 families all over the state of Georgia with a focus on large families and single mothers. 

Although I have helped to found a nonprofit, nonprofits represent one part of the multisector interdisciplinary approach towards social change. So I am learning more about the role of private corporations and emerging financial technology which can fill in gaps that nonprofits cannot. I will not rest until the most vulnerable members of our society have equitable access to success. I have dedicated my life to serving my community.