Hi y'all: This week's abbreviated edition comes to you from a weeklong vacation in the Midwest, where I've already found Counter Culture in the wild.
Instead of a digest & a datebook, I've compiled some quick scribbles of news and events -- more of a cocktail napkin dispatch.
Don't forget SEEK is this weekend at Dix Park. With performances such as Black on Black Project's 'The Will of the Father' and Tift Merritt's 'The Other Side of Hungry River, Sings,' we can reckon with the history of Dix Park and create a future for a park that's truly for everyone.
I'm bummed to miss it. If you go, will you let me know what you thought?
Speaking of Dix Park, there's a Creative Mornings this Friday with Kate Pearce, the Planning Supervisor for Dix Park for the City of Raleigh. Register.
The kickoff for "Raleigh BRT: Equitable Development Around Transit" is Thursday, June 6, at the Raleigh Convention Center. There are two open house options, one from 4-6:30 p.m. and one from 7:30-8:30 p.m. The presentation is 6:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m.
Free parking at the municipal building deck (enter on Morgan Street). Child care is provided. On bus routes 100, 16 and R-Line. More on BRT here.
Raleigh Pride month includes a city-wide slate of events from a 5K to a drag show to a partnership with Videri on a chocolate bar. More on Instagram.
Be sure to read on for a longread-style Making Raleigh interview, too -- this vacation edition gave me a chance to include more of the wonderful conversation I had with Courtney Napier.
To vacation cocktails (especially the roselle margarita from Kansas City's Port Fonda),
Sarah Day
Sarah Day Owen Wiskirchen, Editor & Publisher
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Like the newsletter? Imagine if it was in real life and with shopping that supports women locally and around the world -- then you'll get the spirit of our first event!
Meet up with other women who are making Raleigh a better place through entrepreneurship, leadership and/or community building.
Minerva Media Co. founder and Raleigh Convergence editor & publisher Sarah Day Owen Wiskirchen will host a short live Q&A -- much like in our newsletter -- with Liz Kelly of Liz Kelly Pottery.
The Flourish Market, in their new location on Martin Street, will donate 10% of sales from the evening to Carolina Small Business Development Fund.
Be sure to register!
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Courtney Napier is facilitating conversations about the future. I first found Courtney on Instagram, through her work as one of the founding mothers with Afar, a progressive organization for women that started as an “anti-book club” and expanded into “community circle” conversations around challenging issues such as affordable housing.
Then, I started listening to Mothering on the Margins, a podcast she co-hosts with Tiffany Debnam, about their experiences “as mothers raising black and brown children as members of a marginalized community.”
Making Raleigh is about people who are building the Raleigh of the future, and if Courtney has anything to do with it, we’ll all be doing the work to make it a more welcoming place for all.
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This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Day: Let’s start at the beginning: where did you grow up?
Courtney: I’ve been here most of my life. I was born in California. My dad was in the Marine Corps, so we started out there and moved here when I was about 3.
My whole family is here, my dad’s from here. All of my school years were here: Underwood Elementary, Exploris middle, Raleigh Charter high school.
I met my husband in Virginia. I went to school for ministry, I wanted to be a music minister, (but) changed course. I have that background. I guess that’s where public speaking comes from and comfort in that arena.
Fast forward to having kids, settling back here in Raleigh, (where) my husband found a job.
The catalyst (to getting active here) was the 2016 election. It was a catalyst for a lot of people who -- I wouldn’t say were neutral -- but not as active politically. That spurred me on to find an outlet for those feelings. That’s how I came upon Afar, just a Facebook fluke.
We called it an anti-book club, or like an alt-book club. We as moms have so little time to read full books and to keep up with it for many weeks on end, so we stuck to articles and TED talks and little videos.
I went to the first one and then the person running it was pregnant with their third and renovating a home and they were like, ‘Can you take this?’ That was before my second was born, so 2017, and it’s been growing ever since.
Sarah Day: Did it start out as a group of mothers?
Courtney: Yeah, it was probably a group of 5 or 6 of us, we met at the Morning Times upstairs and at the first one, we talked about white feminism. It was a great article, a great conversation. From there we’ve talked about everything. We’ve read James Baldwin essays, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book on feminism, we’ve talked about education.
Recently we’ve had political candidates coming through. … We’ve had a conversation with Sheriff (Gerald) Baker about policing and relationships with the black community.
That’s been one of the things I’m most proud of about this group: It started as just us hanging out and trying to have some hard conversations in safe place and has become a place where people want to come to us and share in that. And then they take what we speak on and bring it to the larger community through politics or other positions of leadership.
Sarah Day: You’ve had a couple of community circle format events now, right?
Courtney: We’ve had 4 or 5, the (March) one was our most successful so far (editor's note: this interview preceded the Revolutionary Mothering May event). We talked about affordable housing and had an amazing panel of councilman Corey Branch, Niki Jones (an assistant Director in the City of Raleigh’s Housing and Neighborhoods Department who oversees the City’s Affordable Housing initiatives and the Community Development Division), Salley Alley (a former city planner for the City of Raleigh) and folks from the DHIC, a group that helps people to afford housing who wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
We had this really intense conversation about affordable housing, it got pretty heated, but it was great because it pulled folks from all over. You had folks from Mordecai area and Oakwood, and people from South Park and more historically black neighborhoods all in a room.
It’s difficult around here to get all those folks in a room and have a strong but healthy conversation about what’s going on in a personal way, not just throwing numbers around, but folks talking about dislocation and about their neighbors having to move away and being taken advantage of by developers; folks who come into this city and into these communities just wanting something better for their families but then realizing the ripple effect of the home they bought and renovated, or perhaps the house they bought and sold; dealing with all that.
Sarah Day: How did you get so many different people to come?
Courtney: For now, it depends who’s on the panel. I worked closely with councilwoman Nicole Stewart on that one. She was incredibly supportive of this conversation. When you have Corey Branch and Yvette Holmes from DHIC, they have different groups and spheres of influence that are going to be different from Salley Alley or even Nicole. I encouraged them to pull from the folks that they know, because this is something that affects all of us, and they did.
Octavia Rainey is an activist in the area, she was featured in that New York Times article about housing in South Park, so she came and brought folks with her, and folks from Afar. Our next event has a similar effect… You end up with a whole room of, you know, Raleigh, not just parts.
Sarah Day: How do you create spaces so you can have challenging conversations where people still feel safe?
Courtney: My goal is to have a conversation that’s a little bit more reflective. Because I have a background in ministry, I do take a lot of my cues from the church.
I try to make it as personal as possible. I don’t want to make it something that’s intellectual and then just challenging people’s intellect, making them feel like there’s something they don’t know about something they should know about. I want to make it more communal.
We have a great location that doesn’t make it feel like a lecture. Rebus Works is a really cool coffee shop/art studio space, so it feels relaxed.
There’s no stage. It’s just folks sitting together and getting to the roots of issues rather than the divisive politics.
For instance, with the housing conversation, we chose an article that said ‘let’s stop talking about gentrification.’ Because it’s not really the fault of those looking for a home and find an affordable home that suits their family’s needs. It’s not their fault that they found this space and they’re moving and trying to help their family flourish.
It’s about the structures of Raleigh itself, the government: zoning laws that are outdated, how we use our money, the bylaws of different neighborhoods allowing, effectively through the economy, certain people to live there and certain people not to live there. That’s something an individual house hunter is not responsible for. It was taking the blame off the individual -- it’s not your fault you want to have your kid in the best school -- but it is important to understand the impact you are having and the impact you can have. You don’t have to come as a “gentrifier,” it doesn’t mean you have to disrupt. You can come in with the resources you bring and be supportive of the neighborhood as it is, in whichever ways you can see and joining forces with the folks that are already there.
But the thing that we can all come together and do is to come before city council, come before the legislature, and say ‘this is something we all care about, across economic lines and racial lines and education lines. We all want to keep Raleigh diverse, we all want it to be a place where people can come and find a safe place for their families and a great school, afford to start a business, we’re all going to join forces and come at this together from where we are.’
That’s the atmosphere I’m trying to bring. Everybody’s here trying to learn from each other, to be made aware of things you’re not aware of, coming away not feeling hopeless but with something you can do.
Sarah Day: Like an action point.
Courtney: Yeah, we always leave with an action point. Whether it’s as simple as voting… with the education one we learned that anyone can be in a PTA, you don’t have to be parent to be in a PTA. We can give of our time or our income to make these schools stronger. Things like that actually make a difference.
Sarah Day: Are you a musician?
Courtney: (Laughs) Right now my music is singing lullabies to the kids. I do have a background, I played guitar and the drums, when I was younger. My husband is a great musician … guitar, bass, he’s mainly a drummer, a little keys. Maybe someday we’ll do a family band, the kids are really musical too, they love to dance, they love to sing.
Sarah Day: Talk to me about the podcast, how did it get started? What are you hoping to do with it?
Courtney: The creator and my co-host, Tiffany Debnam, she came to me and said ‘there’s this contest going on with PRX and google. They want to back podcasts, especially for minorities and especially for women of color. They’re looking to put money and training behind it.’ She’s like: ‘I have an idea, we should do this! It’s called Mothering on the Margins.’
That’s what it was born out of -- it was really about entering this contest. We went in the studio, made a two-minute teaser about what we wanted to do, and then we didn’t win.
At that point, we really believed in the concept: A place to express the joys and frustrations of motherhood from the perspective of a marginalized woman, person in society. We were like, we gotta do this, especially with both of us are home most of the time. She has connections with studio space, so we already had that. So then it was really just time.
Sarah Day: So that’s why it sounds so good!
Courtney: Yeah! That was the hardest thing, having a space to record. We used the outline we created for the contest. We don’t have as many episodes as we thought we would at this point, but it’s going, it’s happening and every episode we record we’re like, oh my god, we’re back. We’re about to go back in the studio tomorrow night and record episode 4. We’ve already had some cool offers and opportunities arise out of this, which seems kind of crazy because things seem to happen in a way you never expect.
Hopefully we’ll get a couple seasons under our belt and we’ll see from there, but it’s fun.
Sarah Day: What stoked your passion for issues around motherhood and connecting with others?
Courtney: I had a great childhood, my mom is amazing. Growing up in Raleigh, she was at home, I have five younger siblings and it was really amazing what she did with what she had. Sometimes we had a lot and sometimes we had a little... I feel like they moved heaven and earth for us.
My first birth experience was really hard. I experienced the medical racism that a lot of black women experience. From getting to the hospital, I never had a birth room, I was in triage for 6 hours. They never asked for my birth plans. I wanted to go natural, I had a doula and everything, and I could only have one person with me at all times. So I could have had my doula and my husband and my mom with me at all times, but I had to choose.
My husband was running back and forth from the triage room to the waiting room, talking with my doula. I think I ended up seeing at least 30 medical personnel while I was there, just one new face after another and my questions not being answered.
I know I had some postpartum anxiety but I think a lot of that was informed by the experience itself and not so much giving birth.
That definitely lit a fire in me. I was thankful that I had a doula, I was thankful that my mom, who had four of us at home, that she even knew about something like a doula or a midwife, so I had that support. Even with the chaos, my husband and I were able to have a level of control over the situation because of the tools she taught us.
But I just sat there and thought: If I didn’t have her, I don’t know what would have happened; to me, to the baby. That experience really informed my desire to help other moms.
Then, realizing how isolating having a newborn can be. Beyond that, when you do venture out, as a black woman, there’s a lot of feelings about being out with your newborn, whether it’s a run to the supermarket or an activity, like going to the library for a storytime where you tend to be the only one. That can be another level of anxiety. Creating support for those women and when we moved to Raleigh, I immediately sought out a group of friends and was fortunate to find Mocha Moms, a national organization that supports stay-at-home mothers of color.
Sarah Day: I think I saw that on Meetup, right? Is that how you got connected?
Courtney: I did! So that’s how I met Tiffany and a lot of other moms who we’re so close and talk every day. That was important to me.
And it’s hard, especially in Raleigh, Raleigh’s a bit decentralized because of all the suburban sprawl. We have one in Apex, one in Garner, one in Cary, I’m in Knightdale, so it’s hard to get us together all at one time.
But, with something like the podcast, you can have that connection by all listening to the same thing and commenting on social media and hopefully it’s a connection for other moms of color.
But one of the things I didn’t anticipate was white mothers and non-minority mothers listening and being like, ‘wow, I had no idea that my black and brown girlfriends are going through this,’ and this is a great way to do the research and the work of antiracism without burdening your black and brown girlfriends with all the questions, so you can come to the table and say ‘I didn’t realize this was important to you.’
Sarah Day: Thinking big picture, what are some conversations that Raleigh at large needs to have?
Courtney: I think we need to have some more concrete conversations about what equity looks like. One of the things that was eye-opening in the conversation about affordable housing was that there were lots of different concepts about what affordable housing was, and there was definitely a disconnect between what the community’s concept of affordable housing and the city council’s concept. And I think the reason for the disconnect was a lot of our conversations are generalized and broad, almost surface-like, for lack of a better word.
Because Raleigh has changed so quickly, and there were policies put in place to keep Raleigh from changing as quickly, because those who were writing them believed that they could control that, but they really don’t have any control in how fast Raleigh or in what way Raleigh grows.
We’re seeing a big hit to the vision of Raleigh that people come in wanting. I think one of the things that article illuminated was that there are folks, white folks, all kind of folks, coming in looking for diversity. Once they get here, in a few years, it’s gone, and they’re like, ‘I moved here so my kids wouldn’t grow up in suburbia and wouldn’t grow up around a bunch of white kids and it’s gone.’
We need to have a more in-depth and a more honest conversation about how the policies we have in place and are putting in place truly impact especially more vulnerable communities but even Raleigh as a whole.
I think it’s the same thing about schools and thinking about charter schools. I’m not the biggest charter schools fan, but I do understand an element, especially in the black community, that there are some schools that are built because of the inequities that are happening in (traditional) public schools, some of the charter schools that cater to black and brown kids. They want to teach more black history ... But the legislature is seeing this as an alternative to the public school system, and that’s unrealistic. We need to have a more thorough conversation about how that’s really going to impact these communities and children in general.
I feel like we might be having these conversations, but they’re not making them as hard as they need to be.
(editor's note: Courtney shared this later, which ties in to this part of our conversation) Part of the reason Raleigh has had trouble having conversations of impact is because the people who often participate aren’t representative of all sides of the subject.
Access is very important to make sure Raleigh is getting all the information and input it needs to reach its potential. (One example) Durham has a cool way of getting people’s input by having pop up “city halls” in different locations around the community!
Getting creative and smart about how we gather information and include voices will help Raleigh work for everyone.
Sarah Day: What’s something that Raleigh is great at?
Courtney: Raleigh is a wonderful place for families. We do have amazing schools. Wake County has amazing schools.
We have amazing parks, I’m so thankful that we actually prioritize them. If you have the transportation -- and that’s another conversation we need to have -- you have a free place to take your kids. There’s free activities that happen at the parks.
And Raleigh is very diverse. There are places you can go and really get to experience that I don’t know if you could experience other places. … An Indian grocery store is not just good for the Indian community, it’s good for everyone. But it’s also part of what makes it a good place for us to be. You can be in a relatively small city and find really good pho, two doors down it’s an African restaurant and you can get your hair braided two doors down, and that’s really special, especially for the South, but we have to protect that.
This real estate is becoming more desirable for people from all over. We can look at it and say ‘this is such a prime space, why don’t we get someone who can generate another Starbucks, which could generate a lot more money,’ or we could make sure everyone’s taken care of and keep these businesses and this infrastructure for these communities. We’re still getting tax money, we’re still having employment, but I think that’s what equity action looks like and that’s the direction I’d love those conversations going: We could make more money here but at what expense?
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