David Caldwell Jr - On the Beginnings of Community Organization (clip)
Interviewed by Blanche Brown on April 24, 2012
David Caldwell, Jr. (DC): By then I was with the sheriff’s department, and worked with them in ‘85, and stayed until 2008, my retirement.
Blanche Brown (BB): Wow, you’ve been busy [laughs].
DC: Yeah, and while I was there, I got my second degree from Mount Olive College in Criminal Justice. I got out and finished, and since then I’ve been doing community work.
BB: So what led you from sort of the military work to community organizing?
DC: When we started, myself, our first back to school bash was 20-something years ago. And it started out with a brown paper lunch bag, and you probably don’t remember this, but a 25-cent pack of Blue Horse notebook paper that you could cut the little five-points off, and if you get enough of them you could order things. Two pencils, two erasers, and an ink pen. That’s what we gave to the kids, our first batch was 8 kids. Last year we did over 400 backpacks. We shipped them all over the world, we shipped some to Haiti for the earthquake, or no, the flood. And along with the Employment Security Commission in Raleigh, we helped send food to help them on their food drives, on things like that. We’re hoping to go for another 500 this year. If we had a bigger facility, and just the basics, we could do a lot more. We’ve done kids from all over, just helping them out. Just to know that when you go to school you got a brand new backpack with school supplies in it. It just makes you feel better.
BB: Yeah.
DC: I just remember going to school with just, if I was lucky, we had a pencil. And I mean not just me, but the other kids, all of us. You know, so. And then the things that were going on with the promises made, given the amenities and everything I hear [about] and not getting them, and watching the people, you know—the water being bad, and the air being bad, and the soil being bad. And then For them to feel that it’s okay for them to say, “Oh, we’re not gonna do it”. It just, it’s just not gonna work. Reverend Campbell, and I made him a promise that, “You hang in there and when I finish, I’ll come back and help you.” And I’m keeping that promise to him. And this is what we’ve done so far, and still doing a ton of other things.
BB: Yeah, it’s important work.
