Closest to the Pain, Closest to the Power
Angel Brown on Stewarding Money Block by Block
Most grant money never reaches the grandmother watching the neighborhood kids after school, or the neighbor who started a community garden. To qualify, you usually need 501(c)(3) status, and sometimes a minimum annual revenue. The people who know a place best are often locked out of the money meant to help it.
Angel S. Brown has spent the last five years working on that problem. Angel is a storyteller, educator, and one of our Parish Collective Residents in Place. Through her home church of over a decade, Citywell United Methodist, Angel is rooted in the West End/Lakewood neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina. When Chelsea Kim Long, our Residency Convener, was in Raleigh recently, the two of them sat down to talk about how Angel came to this work and where it has taken her.
Funding the People Who Know the Place
In 2021, Angel was Manager of Neighborhood Impact at a nonprofit serving the Triangle (Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill). Her job was to sit with neighborhood leaders while they named what was right, what was wrong and what would fix it, and then fund their solutions directly.
Three of those early partners have stayed with her. Kamal Bell was building Sankofa Farms in rural Durham, and seed money went toward equipment and tools. The farm now feeds neighbors and trains young people, and this year Kamal is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard. Kerwin Pittman grew up in Southeast Raleigh and spent more than eleven years in prison. When Angel met him, he was helping others coming home from incarceration and reintegrate into society. He has since formed a nonprofit and bought a shuttered prison in Goldsboro, and he is turning it into a reentry and workforce campus.
Lived Experience Is Expertise
Angel recorded the life stories of those first grantees, and nearly all of them said some version of the same thing. Kerwin put it this way: the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power. It's a phrase Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley made widely known, and hearing it from the people doing the work changed how Angel thought about wealth, giving, and who gets to decide.
Coming Home to West End/Lakewood
When Angel stepped away from that role, the work came home to her own neighborhood. A national foundation kept funding it, and CityWell became its fiscal sponsor. Angel and Jesse Huddleston, CityWell's music director and a West End neighbor and organizer, relaunched it as the Community Self-Reliance Project. The project partners with neighbors, small businesses, and organizers to meet one another's needs. Its focus has shifted from short-term impact to what lasts. As Angel puts it, the question is "how we can use money to actually need money less."
"What are we building for our youth to inherit?" she asks. "We may not see the fruits of all of the things that we're planting seeds of right now, but we're trusting that the seeds we're planting are going to grow and bear fruit."
Watch the Conversation 👇
Reflection
For a long time, the church has existed mostly for the church. Angel's work shows another way, where a congregation holds resources and trusts its neighbors to decide what the block needs. What's good for the neighborhood is good for the church too.
Who in your neighborhood is already doing this work without a title, a budget, or a board?
What will the next generation on your block inherit from you?
Next Steps
➤ Name three neighbors already at work where you live: the one who keeps the garden, watches the kids, or knows who needs a ride. Ask one of them what they'd do with more support.
➤ If you're part of a church, find out what it holds, including budget lines, buildings, and land. Then ask who decides how those resources are used.
➤ Give to, buy from, or show up for a neighbor-led effort that doesn't have nonprofit status.
