Good Work Collaborative

We are working with local and regional partners to transition Good Work to become a collaborative network that is led by its members. Good Work will become a learning community that advocates for and strengthens services, policies, and leadership that create opportunities for entrepreneurship and sustainable development. It’s a natural evolution from being just a service provider.

Since 1991, Good Work has grown entrepreneurs and nurtured enterprises and communities to be more self-reliant and resilient. In addition, we have sought to strengthen community-based initiatives to encourage social entrepreneurship, community resilience, and collaborative leadership. Since the fall of 2007, our partners and friends have encouraged us to take a more active role in local efforts in the Triangle to help create and support viable alternatives to 'business as usual'. We know collaborative efforts to revitalize our communities can be successful if we leverage and grow our skills and strengths. As we reflect on our past and look toward the future, we know that we must work with others to:

• Provide more educational opportunities in communities
• Support local economies and community development by strengthening sustainable and creative enterprises, including those rooted in the arts, culture, history, natural resources, and good food
• Encourage and incubate cooperatives and community enterprises on any of the above
• Be ambassadors for each other in the community

All members of the Good Work Collaborative have agreed to the Good Work Covenant.

Good Work Covenant

1. We believe in everyone's potential
2. We have high expectations of ourselves and others
3. We bring out the best in each other by encouraging and challenging one another, keeping each other accountable, and working together in a spirit of excellence
4. We are creative stewards of our time, talent, and resources
5. We commit to strengthen the communities where we live and work
6. We strive to nurture authentic community relationships that affirm the dignity, worth, and potential of everyone

Good Work Board Members

• Roger Brown
• Shirley Brown
• Bessie Elmore
• Stephany Hands-Biggs
• John Parker
• Rodney Renix
• Wanda Wallace

Good Work Collaborative

The Good Work Collaborative includes John Parker, the Bountiful Backyards crew, Dawn Trembath, Dennis Gaddy, Ernest and Camryn Smith, and Jane Norton. Information about everyone is below.

John Parker is a self-employed consultant, coach, and organizer who helps grow resilient entrepreneurs and community leaders, and shares his experience with those that help others. His deep areas of focus include culturally appropriate leadership, entrepreneurship, community development, practical ministries, and resilient livelihoods.  He organizes Good Work's collaborative.

He currently serves on the board of the national Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, the advisory board of NC Food Corps, the stakeholder council of the NC Fourth Sector Cluster Initiative, and is co-administrator of a family donor-advised fund at the Triangle Community Foundation.

John's career includes directing Good Work, the Triad Regional Office of Self-Help (a community development financial institution), research and teaching cultural and applied anthropology, extensive ethnographic research, and a variety of work with small businesses, nonprofits, and philanthropic organizations.  John's first job was working in his family's hardware store, Parker Hardware & Supply Company, in Southern Pines, NC.

John is a native from Moore County in North Carolina's Sandhills area in the Piedmont region and received his masters in applied anthropology from the University of Memphis and bachelors at Wake Forest University. John and his wife, Easter Maynard, live in Raleigh with their three children, Lila, James, and Sawyer, surrounded by family.

Bountiful Backyards is a community-based enterprise that works with individuals, neighborhoods, groups, schools, and community organizers to create abundant, low-maintenance and beautiful edible gardens. Since 2006, Bountiful Backyards has installed over 100 edible landscapes, or food forests, which simultaneously grow annual vegetables, fruit trees, berry bushes, beneficial perennials, culinary, medicinal herbs, and soil building plants together. Their efforts and actions are localized, committed, and work from the inside-out in the communities we live, work, and play in.

Their community work centers around sliding scale workshops that have coached and trained hundreds of people in many aspects of home scale food production, from growing edible mushrooms to raising backyard chickens. They are also hard at work creating a Durham network of urban farms and broke ground at Two Ton Farm, a 2,500 sq. foot mini-farm in East Durham. Their relationships in the community are the cornerstone for the regenerative edible landscapes we plant, one part of the greater goal which will provide access to affordable organic food for all. They view their relationships to each other, through broad-based community development organizations like Good Work, and to our clients in the greater Durham community as the cornerstone for regenerative edible landscapes and community gardens.

Dawn Trembath works to support individuals looking for new paths forward to a more fulfilling life. In today's world, this often means learning new skills or new ways of doing things. Dawn serves as a resource to help individuals gain the technology knowledge they need to achieve their goals. She is also working to both identify issues in low-income communities that can be addressed by scientific innovation, and bring these needs to the attention of local scientists & engineers.

Dawn has worked as an engineer, research scientist, instructor, and most recently as a research associate with the North Carolina Board of Science & Technology. She studied Community Psychology at North Carolina State University, where she focused on the participation of non-traditional populations in science & technology. For the past 20 years, Dawn has made her home in Durham. She grew up in the Detroit area, and continues to maintain ties with the many folks she left behind in Michigan.

Her current activities include support for Good Work projects, participating with Recyclique, Scrap Exchange/Triangle Chapter of the ReUse Alliance, and the Fourth Sector Cluster Initiative, as well as fostering collaboration between local universities, tech-related organizations, & low-income communities.

Dennis Gaddy is the Executive Director of the Community Success Initiative (CSI), a non profit organization that was created out of a desire to fill a need to see personal growth and development, and leadership principles become a recognized strategy for achieving success in the lives of everyday people, with an emphasis on men and women transitioning from prison.

Dennis places special emphasis in the areas of goal-setting, developing and maintaining a pleasing personality and a positive mental attitude, time management skills, and keys to optimum vision and leadership. Dennis Gaddy’s personal mission is to help others to be their best, and for the last 20 years, he has refined his skills, leading him into the field of success coaching, training, and consulting people, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor, or socio-economic status.

A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and the Campbell University School of Law, Dennis had a 20 year sales career. However, due to some poor financial decisions he experienced the pain of bankruptcy, the loss of his law license, and prison. Dennis was incarcerated for five years, eight months in the NC Department of Corrections. Rather than being overcome by either success or failure, Dennis studied both, and learned valuable and positive insights from the past. He learned the value of using the past as a place of reference, but not residence, and designed and teaches a 15-Step leadership course on "How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be". This leadership course is the foundation he works from when coaching people in personal growth and development.

Along with his duties at CSI, Dennis currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Triangle Lost Generation Task Force, a organization helping to stem the tide of African-American and Latino youth from going to prison, and also serves as the State Liaison for Prisoner Reentry for the North Carolina NAACP. He also serves on a national reentry sub-committee, for the Center for State Government's National Reentry Resource Center. Dennis is also an entrepreneur and is a partner with Gaddy Success Enterprises. Dennis has been married for 27 years and he and his wife have two daughters.

Ernest and Camryn Smith are the co-directors of Neighborhood Allies of Durham, a community/neighborhood based organization. Ernest and Camryn have served in non-profit arenas for the last 13 years through volunteerism by serving various non-profits in the Durham/Chapel Hill and Fayetteville areas. They also worked vocationally as missionaries serving the Roma/Gypsy population in Romania for a couple of years. Ernest later served as staff pastor at Manna Church in Fayetteville and Camryn assisted in various community outreaches, counseling and community building initiatives. In 2008 after a trip to Jackson, MS for a retreat at the John Perkins center for reconciliation and development they were sensing a shifting in their purpose. After seeking guidance from Dr. John Perkins and others they were sensing a change of focus. After much research, prayer and thought they both decided to shift gears and become trained Asset Based Community Development facilitators. They are in the final phase of membership with Communities First Association which is an umbrella organization for practitioners who facilitate Asset based strategies from a Christian perspective. Their faith is an integral part of who they are and why they do what they do. The Smith's currently love, live and work in North East Central Durham with their family and offer training and consulting in asset based strategies for non-profits, organizations and institutions, both in the faith and secular communities, that are wishing to switch from relief to developmental work in terms of empowering communities that have been traditionally left outside of the margins and ignored by the mainstream. They also work directly with community leaders to engage in direct community organizing to enable communities to determine their direction for themselves, their vision and how to best proceed to get the outcomes they desire from the inside out.

Jane Norton is a designer, group facilitator, and catalyst for personal and cultural transformation. In addition to founding and serving as Chief Visionary Officer for Eartheal (www.eartheal.org), she has a consulting firm, Re-Sourcing Natural Solutions, (www.resourcingthefuture.com under construction) which offers coaching, consulting, and seminars for creating sustainable organizations and communities. Jane developed a model, called Re-Sourcing, that combines natural laws, spiritual principles, and a co-creative visioning/manifestation process. She has 15 years experience working with a variety of corporate, educational, non-profit and governmental organizations offering seminars, coaching, and consulting in creativity, team building, leadership, and sustainable business development. As an adjunct faculty member of the Center for Creative Leadership, she co-created the Leadership for a Sustainable World research project.

Jane has a B.S. in Interior Design, and a Master's in Community Design/ Landscape Architecture. She has been an active board member of many community organizations serving women, healing, peace making, the arts and environmental education. A deep connection to nature and being a mother and grandmother are the experiences that fuel her passion for making the world a place that 'nurtures and sustains all life now and for future generations'.