TODAY Claiming Our Space to Advance Black Girls

GFAC began renting a facility, a former 7-Eleven building, in major disrepair, located at 100 Buford Road, North Chesterfield, Virginia. Since opening the center, GFAC has increased program offerings by 60%. We now serve 700 girls per calendar year, with up to 70 girls in the building at a time. After five years of cultivating an empowering Black space built for Black girls to be seen, heard, and celebrated, GFAC recognized it was time to OWN that space.

We began our One Million Reasons to Build Capital Campaign in December, 2021, to raise funds, and we successfully purchased the building in March, 2022. We set our sights on the next goal: to update and expand our facilities, so the GFAC’s annual programmatic growth can increase by approximately 40%, enabling us to serve up to 200 girls in the new building at a time.

While capital campaigns require a range of sustained collective support from beginning to end, they create tangible opportunities for long-term community investment and communitycontrolled assets. These stories help demonstrate how local organizations leverage community resources to take up space, shift narratives of displacement to narratives of self-determination, and model the power of collective support, creative partnerships, and the role communitycentered arts and social service organizations play in place keeping.