David Caldwell Jr. - On Community Resourcefulness (clip)
Interviewed by Blanche Brown on April 24, 2012
David Caldwell, Jr (DC).: …so that’s the difference in the fight.
Blanche Brown (BB): And it’s interesting, because you were talking about how your family has given so many years of service, but it’s almost like you’re still doing it. Because this is very much…very important type of service.
DC: So many people look at it and say that the only thing that stops us is money. And they say we wait and wait, and say we need this, [and hear back] well we’ll get around to it. We don’t wait, we come up with a way to get it. We always think outside the box; we’re very innovative. We look, we listen, we collaborate with other groups. You’d be surprised talking to somebody, they might say, ‘We need chairs,’ and I’ve got four chairs you can have here, and ‘We need tables, but they’ve got to be the folding kind because we don’t have the space.’ I’ve got a folding table at the house you can have. You know, we need this, we need a screen, here’s how we’re going to get this…the students say we have $200 to do such-and-such. Okay, well whatever. We partner with PORCH, who helps us feed our families and it doesn’t cost us anything. And our summer school, our summer enrichment program, PORCH gives us enough snacks to feed all of our kids for the six weeks that they’re in school. So that saves…that’s how…so people say ‘man they must really have a lot of money with all of that.’ We don’t. We don’t have any money. This is the way it’s done. Our library is done through Harvest Books/Book Harvest [in Durham]. They’ll hate me for not getting the name right.
BB: It’s okay. [laughs]
DC: They come in and do the library, keep the books in order and come out and read to the kids, that type of thing. Our computer lab was donated through Kramer Institute out in Durham. We got the representative from the schools who comes in and sets ‘em up for us. Those types of things. With our summer school, we have a retired schoolteacher of thirty years who comes in as our advisor, and several other people who work with the school system that come in and help run it. And these are all donations, you know they’re donating their time to do this stuff. So this is when we do our graduation for the kids in the summertime, we put a sign on the porch to the parents. You know we’re having a cookout at the graduation, these are the things we need, please sign up for what you want to do. We had close to 100 people here for our kids’ graduation. And we had a monster cookout, and the parents brought the food and supplies. So when we do our backpacks, we go through the outside agency grants and several of the grants to get them furnished, and then we have volunteers who go out and buy them ,and come and stuff them, and give them out, and set the whole program up. It’s all done with time. Reverend Campbell and I have been here I don’t know how many years and never on a steady paycheck. At all. So that’s what it is. And then when we did run across money, it was given back to the program. And that’s what we’re doing. We got an excellent deal on this house — every room you see is used threefold for meetings and that type of deal. And we’re just hoping it’s going to survive through the oncoming onslaught. We’ll see.
