March 22, 2006

Published in Wake Forest, NC

            Murchison and Marshall Harvey of Raleigh, chairman of the new organization’s board, have already been donating their time to work with low-wealth communities, helping them start grass-roots organizations similar to the DuBois Center. They began that work well before Murchison resigned this winter as executive director of the center.

            Now, she said this week, they will continue that work and add several other initiatives including housing rehabilitation and affordable housing as well as preservation and rehabilitation of historic structures in African-American communities.

            “We want Wake Forest to always be our base, but we also want to shift and move out onto a larger platform,” Murchison said.

            Since her resignation, Murchison and her staff have moved into a South White Street storefront, the former location of Inkspot. The move gives them offices upstairs and down, with room upstairs for the Hope Builders program, a future computer lab and a room for dance and music classes in the school of the arts. KB Homes donated desks, chairs and other office furniture, and Murchison’s desk was donated by Mallinckrodt.

            She had to leave several programs behind at the DuBois Center: the food distribution, the after-school tutoring and the alternative school.

            Interim DuBois director George Jones has said he plans to continue the food distribution, but he has not yet found someone to direct the program. Under Tina Horton, who resigned to join Murchison, the program included distribution of donated clothes, household goods and appliances. Horton has offered to help Jones, but her offer has not been accepted. Jones did not respond to telephone messages this week.

            Murchison said she does not have the space to continue the food distribution, but she did accept the donation of a stove in the last week and had someone who needed it.

            Staff from the Banks Kerr D. Kerr Family YMCA in Wakefield continues to run the after-school tutoring program at the DuBois Center with the help of volunteers. Murchison said she did not know whether or not the YMCA would run the summer camp that had been planned.

            The alternative school for high school students who had been suspended needed to stay at the center, Murchison said, because it uses the computer lab in the renovated ag/shop building. The contract with the Wake County school system is with the center.

            She hopes to continue the Mouse in the House program that distributes refurbished computers to youngsters and adults. The owners of White Street Computers donate their time to fix the computers.

            Murchison’s CDC has the contract with Wake County Human Services for the mental health counseling program. With over 100 counselors, about three-fourths of them part-time, the program serves close to 200 families.

            That program will be expanded, Murchison said. “The need is there. We have a wonderful competent, well-trained staff.” Most of those who are now part-time want to leave their other jobs to work with the program full-time.

            The mental health program is already expanding into the Fuquay-Varina area. She has met with people there – “They were begging us to bring our programs to Fuquay.” – and Murchison says the next area for expansion is eastern Wake County: Knightdale, Wendell and Zebulon. “There is a large under-served population there.”

            The CDC is paying Youngsville musician Freddie Green to continue to give music lessons at the DuBois Center for those children who do not own instruments. Murchison said the learning goes slowly because the children cannot practice at home, and she said donations of instruments would really help.

            She plans to have Green give advanced music lessons at her new office, and the dance instructor is already leading classes there.

            The school of the arts has funding, she said, thanks to John Pelosi’s recent birthday art auction that raised over $8,000. From that there is about $1,200 in expenses to be paid. The committee will have a full accounting after it meets March 31.

            Murchison also continues to support The Road Less Traveled Theatre group. They had already purchased the royalties to present the musical “Oliver!” this spring, the cast had been chosen and begun rehearsing, the costumes made, the sets designed. Now the theater group needs a place to rehearse and some place to present the production. “We’ve got to figure out how to salvage that.”

            More than a year ago, WakeMed in Cary donated a complete professional kitchen for another of Murchison’s projects, a culinary arts school. She hopes to be able to retrieve the equipment and find a home for the school soon. “Downtown Wake Forest would be a delightful place,” she said.

            Last week she had a chance to meet with Martha Stewart when she was opening her new homes in a Cary subdivision. Actually, Murchison said, it was more like an audience with royalty, and Murchison never got a chance to pitch her idea for a Martha Stewart culinary arts school. Murchison was invited to the opening because she is a member of the KB Homes advisory council.

            She spent last week working on arrangements for the seventh annual DuBois Jazz Festival, which had a somewhat disappointing turnout. She is on the board of the Wake Forest Cultural Arts Association, which with the National DuBois Alumni Association, sponsors the festival. Proceeds will again be split between the two groups.

            Murchison is somewhat discouraged about the possibility of creating the National Rosenwald Museum in the McElrath Building on the DuBois campus. The alumni board, headed by Lawrence Perry, fired the Brad Thompson Agency, which she had hired to raise funds. The board also passed a resolution not to use outside help in raising funds, she said.

            But she has her eye on another location and is already working with the private owner of a former Rosenwald school in Princeton. It is exceptionally well preserved, Murchison said, with hardwood floors homeowners in Wakefield would die for, the original blackboards, plaster walls and furniture. The owner has enlisted students at the North Carolina State University School of Design to draw up plans for a museum there.

            Murchison is chairman of the North Carolina Rosenwald Schools Coalition.

            A cornerstone of her plans for the CDC is historic preservation. “African-American communities don’t have many historic structures,” she said, and they need to save all they can. She got a taste for historic preservation while working at the center, which has five buildings needing renovation.

            On a local level, Murchison, the CDC, the town of Wake Forest and KB Homes are working with Dianne Jackson to save and renovate her family home on North Allen Road. The town had been about to demolish the house which Jackson’s grandfather built, and was saved only because of Jackson’s plea to the town board this winter. People at KB Homes want to have a project where they can invest some sweat equity, Murchison said, and there is a men’s group at Wake Forest Baptist Church interested in the project.