Community Leadership: Freedom Communities

Community Leadership is a series of posts that highlight Community Quarterbacks from each United Neighborhoods geography. A Community Quarterback is a lead partner agency embedded in their community and dedicated to engaging residents, building local leadership and coordinating services among the funded nonprofit partners.

Freedom Communities is a place-based organization, founded in 2017, working in the Freedom Drive Corridor in West Charlotte to assist families with housing, employment, education and health and wellness.

The Freedom Drive/Wilkinson Boulevard Corridor was recently added to the list of communities served through United Way of Greater Charlotte’s United Neighborhoods initiative, launched in 2017. Through United Neighborhoods, United Way works alongside a community quarterback to convene and provide funding to nonprofits whose services address the needs identified by residents.

Before becoming a community quarterback, however, Freedom Communities created a Collaborative with community leaders and nonprofits where they gathered individuals who lived, worked and worshiped in the Corridor in order to create alignment and a shared vision for how they wanted to see the community grow while conserving its residents.

“We go deep here and work holistically with families while simultaneously investing in the infrastructure that we know our families need to thrive,” Executive Director Hannah Beavers said.

“We often call ourselves the connective tissue; we don’t do all the things or provide all of the services, but we want to make sure that we know who is doing everything, so we can knit together the broader ecosystem of organizations and services that we know that our families need and want access to.”

Freedom Communities ultimately aims to promote family stability by providing programming and services to residents, with a focus on building and preserving affordable housing and expanding access to quality early education.

A highlight of Freedom Communities is their Moms Moving Forward program, which is a two-generation program for low-income, high potential single mothers and children, where they work with cohorts of single mothers over the course of a year to support their upward mobility.

The goals of the program are to help the cohorts increase their incomes, find more stable housing, learn financial skills, receive free mental health resources, connect with other women in their community and more.

“When I became a mom, I didn’t realize how hard it was. And to do it without having a supportive partner is really impossible,” Beavers said.

“The majority of the heads of households in the 28208 zip code, which is where we are rooted, are single mothers. We want to make sure the moms in our community have access to the tools, resources and support network that they need for their families to thrive.”

By working directly with the parents – and ensuring they feel supported and loved and can access the resources they need – Freedom Communities can make a huge difference for the next generation being raised. Beavers and her team have positively impacted almost 400 women and children through Moms Moving Forward since 2020, and in 2023, the incomes of the women that participated in the program increased by 40%.

Another way Freedom Communities is paving the way for success for a new generation is through their affordable housing efforts. Thanks to a partnership with Crosland Southeast, Freedom Communities owns for-rent affordable housing units in the community. The first project of 180 units opened in 2020, the second project of 156 units opened in 2021 and they have now opened a little over 500 units of affordable housing, with more to come.

Being able to afford a rental unit in Charlotte is critical, but it does not provide families with the opportunity to build wealth – generational wealth – like they would be able to through homeownership. Beavers and the team at Freedom Communities want to preserve existing housing and help families in the area become homeowners, and were presented with a unique opportunity to partner with Habitat for Humanity in 2022. Through this partnership, they were able to buy more than 20 housing units in Camp Greene with the goal of turning affordable rent into affordable mortgages by helping families prepare for and achieve homeownership in the next 10 years.

“We are never going to slow down gentrification. We’re not going to be able to stop it. Nobody can, but we can create opportunities for people to stay here and benefit from the amenities that are to come,” Beavers said. 

Another effort to increase affordable housing and homeownership is a partnership between Freedom Communities and True Homes, which has provided Freedom Communities with a low-interest loan that they used to purchase land and build more than 50 affordable townhomes.

Freedom Communities also owns two transitional homes for families in their Moms Moving Forward program if they encounter some sort of housing emergency. 

Bringing affordable housing to the area is part of Freedom Communities’ effort to improve early education as well. 

“We spoke a lot with educators, and it’s where we learned about the need for affordable housing. In a community of mostly renters, rising rents and stagnant wages, families were actually being forced out of their homes and children from their schools, creating a great deal of transiency within the school system,” Beavers said, “Teachers kept saying, ‘look, build affordable housing so we can keep the kids here.’”

“The other thing they kept saying was, ‘look, if kids can come to kindergarten and they know their letters and they know the sounds of the letters, we can help them figure out how to read.’ But, 80% of a child’s brain develops by the age of three, and so many of the kids coming into kindergarten were already behind, and we found out that this corridor was a desert for early education, specifically for zero-to-three year olds.”  

Beavers learned from a local school that their best readers were coming from a preschool that was in the neighborhood, under Gloria Dukes. Dukes wanted to expand, so Freedom Communities bought a building and opened the Bright Future Early Learning Center in 2022. 

There are around 70 slots for zero-to-three year olds in the preschool, with a few more slots opening soon and plans for future expansion on Gloria’s original location as well. 

The work Freedom Communities does has always been centered on working together to achieve collective impact, and they are able to amplify their efforts in their role as a community quarterback.

“We are really grateful to partner with United Way. We get to collaborate and work with other community leaders that are doing very similar work, and we can understand and learn best practices, understand challenges and share solutions,” Beavers said.

“This work is hard, it’s so hard. And the staff at United Way, as well as the other nonprofit partners they invest in have been a really great network for us to continue learning from and to continue growing.” 

Learn more about the work United Way is doing through United Neighborhoods today.