Community Leadership: Historic West End Partners 

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. 

As a native Charlottean, J’Tanya Adams has lived through urban renewal, or as she says, ‘urban removal,’ having seen families, churches and businesses scatter and relocate to other parts of the city. 

Adams lives in the Historic West End, which is home to some of the oldest surviving Black neighborhoods in Charlotte. Organizations like Historic West End Partners are working hard to ensure the Historic West End not only survives, but thrives, through cultural preservation and economic development stimulation. 

Established in 2010, Historic West End Partners came to be after Adams decided she and some like-minded community members could solve the challenges their community was facing instead of waiting on someone to come in and save it.  

“We stepped in as an organization to do anti-displacement work, rebuild the community and revitalize the corridor,” Adams said. 

Historic West End Partners is the community quarterback for the Historic West End, one of the more recent communities funded through United Way of Greater Charlotte’s United Neighborhoods initiative for place-based work. Through United Neighborhoods, United Way works alongside the community quarterback to convene and provide funding to nonprofits whose services address needs identified by residents.   

“Becoming a quarterback not only gave us unrestricted funds to do what we wanted to and were already doing, but it also helped us bring together wonderful providers who are doing what we still need done in our space,” Adams said. 

For example, Historic West End Partners works with For The Struggle to assist seniors in the community, with The Bulb to bring in fresh produce every other weekend for their neighbors and with West Side Community Land Trust to assist with housing needs. 

In addition to keeping residents in place and improving their health and wellbeing, Adams and her team are keeping legacy businesses in place as well as bringing in some new businesses through partnerships with property owners, residents, businesses, investors and institutions.  

“It has been amazing to be able to transform these facades and to bring back things that we once had – an ice cream shop, a pizza shop, a music venue and other things like that – it is exciting to regain those things,” Adams said. 

If you have walked around Historic West End lately, you will see the fruits of this organization’s labor. There are plenty of parks to visit, churches and chapels, restaurants, places to shop and beautiful, vibrant murals all around the neighborhood that capture legacy buildings and prominent figures in Historic West End’s history. 

Adams and her team at Historic West End Partners have no intention of slowing down in the coming years. Aside from continuing their usual work, they have plans to open a co-op, which will consist of three buildings – one will host multifamily and senior living units, one will be a 15,000 square-foot grocery store and one will be a small business incubator and mobility hub.  

“We’re going to continue to revive and build on that, and with the help of organizations like United Way, their partners and the education we get, and to be able to go to them and to express the next things that we need, we can make our dreams a reality,” Adams said. 

“We’re excited that United Way is connecting us to wonderful people who believe like we do, that this city can be great indeed.” 

Learn more about the work United Way is doing through United Neighborhoods today. To get stories like this delivered to your inbox monthly, subscribe to United Voices.