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, Rodney Renix, Bessie Elmore, the Bountiful Backyards crew, Dawn Trembath, Rob Jones, Nick Fox, Dennis Gaddy, Vimala Rajendran, and Marcus W. Fryar. Information about everyone is below.

John Parker is a self-employed consultant and coach 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 boards of NC Food Corps and NCSU Institute for Emerging Issues' working group on Generation Z, the stakeholder council of the NC Fourth Sector Cluster Initiative, and is co-administrator of the InSight Fund, 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.

Rodney Renix is the Historically Underutilized Business (HUB) Coordinator for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Rodney serves as an advocate to create inclusion opportunities for minorities, women, and small business owners within all areas of the Department.

Rodney works with entrepreneurs in all areas of business to become sustainable and competitive. He has a passion for community and small business development, and currently serves on the board of directors for Good Work. Rodney has additional experience working as the director for the UDI Business Resource Center in Durham, NC.

Rodney received his bachelor’s degree from North Carolina Central University in Business Administration-Management, with a minor in Public Administration.

Rodney is a native of Waukegan, Illinois, but currently lives in Raleigh, and is married to his beautiful wife Kimberly. He is also the father of three amazing children: Miles, Kenya, and Nylah (all 5yrs old and under!).

Bessie L. Johnson-Elmore a born motivator. Her father, grandfather, and great grandfather were Baptist ministers. Motivating people is in her blood. Bessie was born in Macon County Alabama, the heart of the Civil rights movement. A member and past president of the Bull City Toastmasters, Bessie has been sharpening her skills, for the last 16 years, taking course after course in becoming the best she can be in the field of Self-Help and Life Skills Coaching.

Bessie matriculated at Rutgers and Seton Hall University in New Jersey and is continuing her education at University of Phoenix. The accounting and marketing courses fueled her passion for the work she would later do in Durham, North Carolina.

The journey to Durham North Carolina would lead in directions of a dream she had as a child to become a nurse and a teacher, little did she know how that dream would turn out. As a nurse, she nurses in the personal growth and development field, healing broken souls. As a teacher, she teaches new concepts for a better quality of life. A divorced mother of two grown children Cheryl and William. Bessie is the CEO and Founder of Turning Corners Alliance a program designed for at-risk youth, ex-offenders, domestic violence and grandparents raising grandchildren. All of her education and personal life’s experience in the field of personal growth and development allows her to go where people are to walk the walk and talk the talk.

Bessie serves on the board of Good Work. She works with several non-profits in Durham, Wake, Orange, Chatham, and Guilford Counties. She volunteers at the Durham County jail and at various prisons and group homes in North Carolina, teaching classes on domestic violence, parenting, money management, housing counseling, job readiness, personal growth and development and HIV and AIDS awareness. Bessie believes in the phrase, "Teach a person to fish and they feed themselves for a lifetime."

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.

Rob Jones is a radical educator and food activist working to make sustainable food accessible and affordable by empowering communities to grow food. As part of Good Work's Green Enterprise and Food collaborative Rob works to expand our understanding of entrepreneurship to include all of the ways we create livelihood for ourselves; from paid work to growing food in a home or community garden.

Rob organizes Crop Mob a group of young, landless, and/or wannabe farmers that works collectively and builds community within sustainable agriculture. He also cooks and collaborates with community organizer/chef Vimala Rajendran in her community kitchen. In his work Rob draws on his undergraduate studies in Biology and graduate studies in Environmental Education but finds his informal education to be as useful if not more useful. Working with communities and observing the natural world have been some of his biggest teachers.

Nick Fox is an engineer with Piedmont Biofuels. He is dedicated to building and replicating sustainable models of energy, agriculture and architecture. He started his work on the forefront of sustainable agriculture systems, utilizing innovative business models and technology. His work spread into the emerging field of green building with the launch of a design-build company aimed at implementing appropriate technology and zero waste building systems. In 2004, Mr. Fox founded and directed the Olympia Biofuels Cooperative, a member-owned distributor and retailer of B100 biodiesel. In 2007, Mr. Fox went on to manage production and fuel quality at Newport Biodiesel, a vertically integrated biodiesel producer in Newport, RI. Mr. Fox received his undergraduate degree, with a focus on business and economics, from Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington. More about Nick here: http://www.biofuels.coop/nick-fox

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.

Vimala Rajendran, Executive Chef of Vimala's Curryblossom Cafe in Carrboro, has been a longtime activist for progressive causes including grassroots media, international peace and stopping domestic violence. Through it all, she has fed the movement. Her food has shown up everywhere, from protests across the region to weddings and private parties to the Weaver Street Market lawn and Johnny’s in Carrboro. See more about Vimala here: http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/vimala-cooks-everybody-eats/Content?oid=1214691

Marcus W. Fryar manages the business and personal services divisions of Fryar Management Group, LLC. He possesses over 13 years experience working for Fortune 50 companies State Farm Insurance and Nortel Networks.

After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in mathematics, Marcus began working as an investment banker in Raleigh, North Carolina. His clients primarily invested in small cap stocks and various venture capital projects. Marcus next worked as a claim specialist for State Farm Insurance where his primary areas of responsibility included managing litigation expenses and negotiating large bodily injury settlements with prominent Triangle attorneys. His final corporate position as contract manager in the global supply chain of Nortel Networks afforded Marcus the opportunity to oversee the pricing of Nortel products for large telco accounts Verizon, Qwest, SBC, Bell South and Sprint.

Upon completing his MBA, Marcus formed Fryar Management Group, LLC to help small business owners as well as individuals and families extract the maximum amount of value from their resources. His depth of experience in a number of financial disciplines enables the company's clients to grow and prosper.

Marcus is an Adjunct Professor of Management at the North Carolina Central University School of Business, is a lifetime member of the Institute of Management Accountants and Empire Who's Who, and has been featured in interviews with Accountant's World and Accounting Technology.