“It is a job, but to me it’s more of a privilege and honor to provide healthy, safe livings for our community members.”
The Town of Chapel Hill in collaboration with 97.9 The Hill WCHL & Chapelboro.com present “Our Town: Stories of Chapel Hill.” Each month you’ll hear from the people at the heart of your local government who are learning, serving, and working together to build a community where people thrive. This month, Jamila Lunsford and Derrick Parrish with the Town of Chapel Hill Housing and Community Development Department share their story.
Jamila Lunsford: I’m a management analyst within the Town of Chapel Hill Housing and Community Development Department. We serve 296 units within 12 different communities.
Derrick Parrish: I have been with Town of Chapel Hill Housing and Community Development Department for almost 14 years. As a maintenance supervisor, there really is no typical day for me on a day-to-day operation. It can range from just oversight of maintenance staff, to responding to different things in our communities, emergency response, meetings, literally there’s a wide range of things that I do as a maintenance supervisor.
Lunsford: One thing I admire, and that really inspires me about Derrick, is that even though we serve hundreds of residents, he builds a relationship with them individually. He knows residents by their names, he knows things about their families, and to me that’s just astounding that he serves that many people and can really build that kind of relationship with them individually and make them feel important.
North Columbia Street Housing. Photo via ChapelHillNC,gov
Lunsford: In a storm like Tropical Storm Chantal, it really surprised us because we didn’t expect it to have as much of an impact as it did to our community and to our staff.
Parrish: We had one mechanic on call and literally not even within 45 minutes, everybody had mobilized to respond to all of our communities, jumping right in. It’s such an honor to work with a team that literally just shows up in time of need for everyone, no matter what that call is, even if it’s outside of their normal day-to-day scope of work.
Lunsford: After the storm, it was a lot of making sure our residents were safe, making sure that they had food and clothing and access to transportation. That’s something that you don’t see everywhere. But the Town of Chapel Hill really showed up.
Parrish: One thing that I love about our public housing communities is a lot of them, you can’t even tell that they are public housing properties. They’re intertwined with the community. Perfect example is our Craig-Gomains neighborhood, it is on five different streets and a lot of people coming from other areas, they can’t even tell that it’s public housing.
Craig-Gomains neighborhood. Photo vis ChapelHillNC.gov
Lunsford: In the Town of Chapel Hill, we have a public housing department. It’s not an agency managed by the state. We own and operate all of our properties. I want to give a shout out to all the departments in the Town, because when we have community events like food distribution and National Night Out, it’s not just for a certain demographic, it’s for the entire community. It’s just a community to network, have fun, and just fellowship In Chapel Hill, one of the approaches that we take is to involve our community in planning. So anytime that we’re talking about projects and how to spend taxpayer dollars and federal dollars, we involve the community. We don’t want to just push onto them things that we think would be good or things that we think would be great. We want to hear from them. What would make your place and where you live and work and play better for you and your family. We invite residents to provide input. We do surveys just to see what they want. We make sure that there’s interpreters available, there’s language access resources, there’s flyers and documentation that has been translated for them so that we can make sure they understand what’s happening. It’s an inclusive space.
Derrick Parrish and Jamila Lunsford in the 97.9 The Hill Community Studio
Parrish: One of the reasons I got into this work is, is actually following my grandfather’s footsteps. His name is Ted Parrish and he’s been heavily involved in the Town of Chapel Hill, Pine Knolls development, nonprofit organizations, developing different programs, he sat on the school board. And I grew up working on some of the properties that he literally maintained and made affordable for families who may not have the money to be able to buy or rent their own home and made it like pennies on a dollar compared to what most people will pay for a house. And just working on those properties and seeing those families grow and thrive in the community is really what guided me to take on this kind of work. Behind the scenes, it is a job, but to me it’s more of a privilege and honor to provide healthy, safe livings for our community members.
Lunsford: I was a single mom, and I was a young mom, and I used to need some of the services that we offer to our community, and I know how valuable it was for me as a single parent. So I know the services are very necessary and they help people. They give them a steppingstone to growing and developing and thriving, because that’s where I came from, and I feel like it was something that I went through at the time, and it helped me to grow and flourish. And now I’m part of the process of helping to make sure those services are available to people that may have had a hard time or may have had some things in life that have put them in a situation that they couldn’t control.
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