Everyone Gets to Thrive

Author ALY SEMIGRAN, CONTENT SPECIALIST

With a quickly growing population of over 300,000 individuals, Durham, North Carolina is a small, but mighty and ambitious city. A similar sentiment can be said for the nonprofit organization StepUp Durham, which is comprised of a team of ten part-time and full-time employees, but whose work and reach is immeasurable to the people and communities they serve. As Executive Director Syretta Hill puts it, “[Our work] is less about how many people we serve, and more about the depth of service.”

Established in Durham in 2015, StepUp works toward transforming the lives of adults and children with life skills training and meaningful, stable employment through step-based programming. “It’s really important for us that people don’t just get a job,” Hill explains, “It’s that they get a decent job and keep it.”

The program’s steps focus on employment training, job placement (within 90 days) and career retention. Step 1 is Work, which includes job coaching and employer referrals, targets reemployment and long-term success. Step 2 is an eight-week block called Grow, and it focuses on personal development, career development, leadership development and education.

Finally, Step 3 is Thrive, which emphasizes personal achievements and stability. “Simply getting by is not stable, it’s slowly exhausting,” says Operations Director Tim Wollin. Completing this final step includes having participants take public speaking training, completing a community-driven passion project and accomplishing a life goal, which they are given $1,000 to do. The latter, Wollin explains, is not for paying bills or going into their savings, rather so that participants can “do something that feels good that they couldn’t do when money was a barrier.”

Other programming at StepUp Durham includes StepUp Kidz (which supports the children of participants), Elevate (which provides short-term courses and educational opportunities) and Excel (where formerly incarcerated individuals receive an unconditional $600 per month cash stipend). This guaranteed income pilot program was created to reduce recidivism in the state, where roughly 40% of incarcerated individuals return to jail.