Freedom Communities is a human services agency supporting families in Charlotte, NC to achieve economic mobility. The organization aims to disrupt the cycle of intergenerational poverty by focusing on building and preserving affordable housing, expanding access to quality early education, and serving as a “connective tissue” to bring together different groups in their community.

Freedom Communities is a member of EMPath’s global learning network, a community of over 140 organizations. Through this network, called the Economic Mobility Exchange™, EMPath offers resources, support, and trainings and shares our research-backed method for helping people in poverty climb the economic ladder. Exchange members share back their lessons learned and what it takes to adapt best practices locally.

EMPath spoke with the Executive Director of Freedom Communities, Hannah Beavers, to learn more about their work.

Briefly describe Freedom Communities’ approach to providing educational support to students and parents.

Our tagline here at Freedom Communities is “Family Centered Community Transformation.” We put families in the center of everything we do, because we believe that the way to transform communities is to start with the families who live there.

We’re a place-based organization serving a specific part of Charlotte, NC called the Freedom Drive Corridor, where single mothers represent over half of heads of household. Often working multiple jobs to support their families, these moms have limited time and capacity to invest in themselves and their children. Most are earning below $10/hour, are unbanked, without savings, and often move multiple times throughout the year to chase affordable rents. This creates toxic stress for the whole family and has a detrimental impact on children’s education. Prior to COVID, in neighborhood schools, less than 20% of children were reading proficient by third grade. Data shows that third grade reading proficiency indicates later high school graduation rates, incarceration rates, teenage pregnancy, and more.

In order to break this cycle, we center our work around a two-generation approach that works simultaneously with a mother and her children to build sustainable pathways for success. This program, called Moms Moving Forward, is a cohort-based program providing single mothers with the tools, skills, mindset, and supportive network to transform their entire households.

Recognizing the opportunity cost these moms have in participating in our program, we pay for participation. Moms are paid for each coaching session and workshop they attend, and Freedom Communities matches their savings and incentivizes engagement with their children’s education.

In addition to working hand-in-hand with mothers and children, we also invest in the development of the Freedom Drive Corridor to create an environment where all families can thrive. These investments include the expansion of quality early education and the creation of more affordable housing and homeownership opportunities.

How have services shifted for Freedom Communities as a result of the pandemic?

In the short-term, we shifted many of our efforts to support families’ basic needs. We provided emergency funding and weekly meals for a local preschool. We also supported book and food drives, provided groceries, snack packs, and prepared meals for students in neighborhood schools, and conducted monthly food pop-ups in our parking lot. We served nearly 2,000 people through these efforts.

When the go-to agency in our city temporarily halted rental assistance, we raised and deployed funds for rental and utility assistance. We also served as the lead for a local cross-sector collaboration between our school system, local churches, and nonprofits, to coordinate resources and volunteers for 24 Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools emergency meal sites.

In order to make a deeper impact, we refocused our efforts around single mothers. Over half of the heads of households in the Freedom Drive Corridor where we work are single mothers. We believe that these mothers have the most potential to impact the next generation. COVID disproportionately affected these mothers who, unable to work from home, were either forced to quit their jobs or leave their children at home unattended during the day. We launched Moms Moving Forward to support single moms and their children navigate pathways for long-term economic stability.

We leverage use EMPath’s Bridge to Self-Sufficiency® to determine a baseline measure for each participant across their housing stability, employment, wages, physical and mental well-being, support network, and financial capability. Weekly coaching meetings and monthly workshops help mothers set and attain goals in each area of the Bridge.

To better support children and meet the most pressing community needs, we delayed our plans of opening a preschool and career center. In the interim, we used the classrooms to support children with virtual learning support in partnership with the YMCA.

What’s something exciting coming up in the new school year at Freedom Communities?

Right now, we’re in the final stages of constructing an early learning center on site in partnership with a local preschool provider who has operated a five-star center and lived in the community for nearly 30 years.

We learned that less than 20% of children in our neighborhood schools were reading proficient by third grade, and of the children who were excelling in reading, many had come from a center called Bright Future Learning Center. With their current site at capacity, we forged a partnership with Bright Future’s owners, Gloria and Ray Dukes, and purchased an old church that we’re in the process of converting into a new early learning site. At this site, Bright Future will open 75 new slots for children in the community ages six weeks to three years. The center will also be integrated into our other programming on site, allowing mothers to enroll in our Moms Moving Forward program and access our support closet and workforce development trainings.

We will also be opening 156 new units of affordable housing in the fall to address the affordable housing crisis in our city. We are also pursuing opportunities to develop units that we can convert for homeownership.

Anything else you’d like to highlight?

Our goal with Moms Moving Forward is to create economic mobility for whole families while simultaneously building a support network among families in the program.

During the next 12 months, we will recruit and launch three Moms Moving Forward cohorts with 15 mothers each and graduate two cohorts from the program. We will meet weekly with each participant, host monthly group workshops, and we develop customized education success plans for each child. We will work directly with an estimated 270 people.

We also have an alumni program led by program graduates who check in monthly with their fellow graduates to evaluate their progress in the 12 months after graduation. These efforts, in addition to a monthly “sister circle” time where we bring all cohorts together to build community, are helping families build the mindset, skills, home environment, and supportive community to become upwardly mobile.