Austin Costner, Cleveland County organizer, stands in front of a storage unit filled with donated supplies during a countywide distribution that delivered more than 4,500 items.

In Cleveland County, Advance Carolina’s Southwest team is staying connected to the community through service, local engagement and intentional outreach to young people.

On March 9, Austin Costner, Cleveland County organizer, led a countywide school supply distribution, delivering more than 4,500 donated items to over 32 locations. The effort reached every public school in Cleveland County, as well as district programs, after-school sites such as the Boys & Girls Club, and local colleges and universities.

A volunteer delivery team that included Advance Carolina staff and regional partners supported the distribution, reflecting a coordinated approach to meeting community needs.

“This work is about more than supplies. It’s about making sure students have what they need to succeed,” said Austin Costner, Cleveland County organizer. “Access to basic resources is a critical part of economic empowerment.”

Local partners and members of NAACP Branch 5379-B gather at a Cleveland County Board of Education meeting to honor the Shelby 4, who broke racial barriers in 1963.

Honoring local history and advancing community recognition

Following the distribution, local partners gathered at a Cleveland County Board of Education meeting alongside members of NAACP Branch 5379-B, where the board voted unanimously to honor the Shelby 4 — four students who, in 1963, broke racial barriers by attending an all-white school.

The resolution recognizes Rayfield Cabaniss, Mary Elizabeth Borders, Severne Logan Budd and Cynthia Lowe for their courage and lasting impact. Community members also recognized Budd, the only living member of the group.

After more than six decades, the effort will result in the placement of a memorial within Shelby High School, marking a significant milestone in preserving local history and honoring those who paved the way.

Cleveland County students visit the Advance Carolina table at the C.O.R.E. HBCU College and Career Fair.

Engaging the next generation

The following week, on March 10-11, the Cleveland County organizing team participated in the C.O.R.E HBCU College and Career Fair, connecting directly with students about opportunities for civic engagement and leadership.

During the two-day event, nearly 60 students signed up to volunteer or receive organizational updates. The team also established connections with advisors from North Carolina A&T State University, UNC Charlotte and Cleveland Community College, opening the door for future partnerships and campus-based engagement.

Across each of these efforts, Advance Carolina’s Southwest regional team in Cleveland County continues to demonstrate a community-centered approach rooted in service, partnership and long-term impact.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The kind of training Advance Carolina organizing director Kay Brown had in mind for the team needed to be more than a two-day retreat merely checking a box indicating her direct reports at least went through some kind of annual learning module. No, the retreat had to get beyond the surface level, and it wound up being a dive so deep it was like camping out on the ocean floor for a week.

You literally had to be there.

“We didn’t even have a Zoom option,” Brown said. “This was an intentional thing. Folks took the train here if they couldn’t drive.”

“Building Back Black: An Organizing Intensive” was a training Brown spearheaded with training coordinator Irving Allen and thought partner Brandon Wrencher in the spirit of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s 1964 Freedom Summer that pushed for voting rights and voter representation for Black people, promoting Black liberation through education, as well. A weeklong retreat was necessary in order to aerate fallow organizing soil and make it fertile, Brown suggested.

“We’re doing deeper agitations with our people on their why,” she said. “Really, though, why do we organize?”

“Organizing begins with building trust and being vulnerable,” North Carolina community activist Bettie Murchison said.

“Organizers dig deep into community, have conversations with people and bring them along so they can advocate for themselves,” Brown said. “The key word is we’re not advocating for just the Black elite, right? It’s not that we’re building institutions for just a few Black folks. We’re working to connect and build back the totality of Black community. And that’s going to require more than just what a Kay Brown being strong can bring to the table because we need more than just one Kay. We need hundreds of Kays and hundreds of people that haven’t activated to activate.”

Brown distinguishes organizing from advocating.

“If we’re just advocating, then we are just moving maybe a handful of people who can hear a speech or a message. But that’s not necessarily building power with a collective,” she said.

An experienced organizer, Brown’s takeaways from the retreat include leveraging Advance Carolina’s cache to activate the community into addressing and finding solutions for the issues impacting them.

The retreat also helped Brown realize that her teams — like Black voters —- are not monolithic.

“What I have to have is a tailored approach that works with each team in each region to bring them where they need to be, and that’s going to be a very intentional and delicate process,” Brown said.

Advancing education and the Black economy

It’s not like Brown hasn’t gotten movement. Heading into this past November’s election, her direction empowered sister organization North Carolina Black Alliance to deploy workers who reached 105,000 North Carolinians face to face with a nonpartisan message about what was at stake. Phone banking reached some 50,000 Black voters across the state.

Brown wants to do more. Education and the Black economy are two issues Advance Carolina will address this year. She said that’s based on her team members having their ears to the ground.

It’ll take buy-in from community leaders, Murchison said.

“If the OGs approve of you, then the walk is far easier. If you step into a community without them or at least without mentioning you talked with them first, it is harder to gain entry,” Murchison said. “We are asking community folks to be vulnerable and trust us.”

Murchison tells the story of doing consulting work for a friend who runs an international nonprofit organization. The friend needed at-home COVID-19 test kits distributed in Greenville. It was a pilot program on the strength of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, plus North Carolina Central University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University..

“They were all excited but did not know how to engage the community,” Murchison said. “I called one person, Mildred Council, my Swing Phi Swing sister, and asked her to pull together a team to distribute the kits. Mildred is one of the most well known and respected persons in Pitt County. She made calls, and we had a team mobilized and ready to go in days. This team distributed over 40,000 test kits with 25 tests in each one across Pitt County in just a few weeks. They insisted the kits be shared across Pitt County and not just Greenville. I told the panel of academics and health care professionals about their terms. They called Dr. Francis [Collins] at the CDC, and it was a go, a great experience that I will never forget. Trusted community leaders make all the difference.”

2024 election organizing versus mobilizing

That’s the difference between an advocate locked in on advancing a single issue versus an organizer focusing on moving people, Brown said.

“People confuse organizing with activism. An activist speaks out on issues, an organizer moves the people on an issue,” Brown said.

Not just any issue, though — the people’s business is what matters, and that’s ascertained by getting closer to them, Brown said.

In the run-up to the November election, Brown said she was in the community having conversations about high gas prices and other household economics.

Politicians, on the other hand, were on TV talking about abortion access and LGBTQ protections.

“I’m not saying that isn’t important, but, for many, it was not the No. 1 issue for most people,” Brown said. “If political decision-makers were actually out spending time in community, organizing and talking to people like they said they were in more than a transactional way, they would have seen it.”

Triad regional coordinator Mikayla Massey with 2024 primary election volunteers in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Two Powells, two organizing paths

In a 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell laid out a plan for corporate America to counter social movements, such as environmentalism, that stood in the way of big business. Known as the Powell Memo, it promoted the need for the economically advantaged to control the courts and flagged higher ed and mainstream media as troublesome. He wrote: “But independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is, will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in the consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

The point there is progressive-minded folk don’t have a monopoly on organizing. Conservatives do it, too.  A wonderful pep rally can’t compete with a solid game plan. Brown would tell you the Trump campaign had a message that connected, and the cascade of White House executive orders is the result.

“Think about that,” Brown said. “They organized. They built power. And they won. That’s what happened. We’ve got to organize people. We have to touch somebody, and that just can’t be a transactional thing,” Brown said.

Another Powell, Frankie Powell, Ph.D., is a lot of things — an educator, a researcher, an activist, a mentor. She’s an organizer, too, involved years ago in the Nov. 3, 1979, pro-Black, anti-Ku Klux Klan movement that became known as the Greensboro Massacre. American Nazis and members of the Klan shot and killed five members of the Communist Workers Party during a rally originating at a Greensboro public housing community.

The Building Back Black retreat included required reading about the Greensboro Massacre. Powell was at the retreat, and it’s as if she emerged from the pages of history.

“Dr. Powell was literally in the book,” Brown said.

While Powell didn’t ultimately absorb an assassin’s bullet, she did, in fact, take one. “Dr. Powell took a bullet at the Greensboro Massacre. Pregnant,” Brown said. Powell is a living exhibit of Advance Carolina’s why, Brown suggested.

“All the rights and freedoms that we have right now weren’t because some folks in this country just decided to do the right thing. It’s because people organized on those that were oppressing them,” Brown said. “So when we let go of doing that, then we get to where we get organized on. And that’s what’s happening now — we’re getting organized on.”

Retreat Highlights