Barbara Jessie-Black, who helped lead the Carrboro nonprofit CommunityWorx for more than two decades, died this week at the age of 62.
A post made on Jessie-Black’s personal Facebook profile said she died on Sunday morning and was “surrounded by family, friends and Sam Cooke.” The nonprofit confirmed the news with its own post in her honor on Tuesday, thanking its president and CEO for her leadership and saying its team is grieving the “profound loss.”
“For more than 20 years, [Jessie-Black] dedicated her life to the mission of CommunityWorx, uplifting our neighbors, empowering our staff, and strengthening the community she so deeply loved,” reads its statement. “Her leadership shaped the heart of this organization. Barbara championed fair wages, access to opportunity, and dignity for all. She was a tireless advocate for equity, compassion, and connection, values that will continue to guide our work every day.”
Jessie-Black came to the Chapel Hill and Carrboro community after being born and raised in Berlin, Germany as the daughter of a military family. She earned her undergraduate business degree at Augusta University in Georgia before graduating with a masters from Meredith College in Raleigh, and spent much of her professional life working in the nonprofit and social justice realm. She began working with the PTA Thrift Shop in Carrboro as its executive director in 2004 to help the historic nonprofit diversify its business while adapting to major upheaval.
Some of that upheaval was financial — as Jessie-Black helped navigate the thrift shop through the 2008-09 economic recession by expanding its operations and beginning to set its sights on additional ways to bring in revenue. The shop, which was founded in 1952 to raise funds for arts education in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools district, donated 10% of its profits and some of its inventory to public school students. Under Jessie-Black, it expanded its campus and kickstarted its efforts to look beyond just traditional retail options for how to help all school-aged children in the community. A capital investment campaign helped the PTA Thrift Shop fundraise to build a new, bigger home for its shop at 125 West Main Street in Carrboro and eventually its adjacent programming space at 117 West Main Street.
A marketing change later brought attention and consternation to the nonprofit’s door. With the efforts to expand the thrift shop’s impact, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools PTA council requested the nonprofit drop “PTA” from its name since it was not exclusively going back to the council to support local school children. The result was a rebrand to CommunityWorx in 2019, as well as a refreshed push to address the opportunity gap among lower-income local children. That included partnering with more and more youth-focused nonprofits by offering space along West Main Street at its YouthWorx on Main building.
“It’s interesting because when you think about what the PTA Thrift Shop has been doing,” Jessie-Black said at the time of the rebrand. “Since its inception in 1952, it’s been all about community with a focus on youth. This was a really nice natural progression into that name: CommunityWorx.”
The COVID-19 pandemic created its own set of challenges for CommunityWorx, which had to pivot from in-person sales to online operations and caused a blow to its bottom line. One of those challenges was facing foreclosure on the West Main Street properties in 2024. After exploring sales for the building, Jessie-Black helped strike up a partnership with the Shared Visions Foundation in fall 2024 to avoid defaulting to the bank and become a tenant of the space instead of its owner. During an interview with 97.9 The Hill, she said the nonprofit was determined to partner with a nonprofit or entrepreneur that shared CommunityWorx’s commitment to equity and social justice — and she described Shared Visions’ emergence as a “the universe [opening] up a way” to find a solution.
President and CEO of CommunityWorx Barbara Jessie-Black (right) visits the 97.9 The Hill studio in Dec. 2024 to speak with Aaron Keck and Shared Vision Foundation’s Jay Miller. (Photo by Aaron Keck/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
“It will look exactly like it does now, with slight tweaking,” Jessie-Black said in Dec. 2024 about the nonprofit’s operations and future. “One of the things that the sale has done is [to] provide the stability that we need in order to fundraise, to write the grants that have supported YouthWorx. Instability doesn’t [help]: if people aren’t sure you’re going to be around, why would they invest?
“So I’m here to say: we’re going to continue to be around for the next 20, 30, 40 years,” she concluded. “And our goal is to get the community’s support to continue to have us in that space.”
In its statement about her death, CommunityWorx said memorial arrangements to honor Barbara Jessie-Black will be shared at a later date.
Featured photo via the Chamber for a Greater Chapel Hill-Carrboro.
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