June 2025 — Durham, North Carolina
There is a photograph—a collage, rather—that I return to often. Not for vanity’s sake, but for calibration. It is a composition of epochs, of collisions. A handshake with a president. A letter from a statesman. A quiet moment beside a warrior-scholar. And within each frame: not mere recognition, but responsibility.
These were not stages upon which I played a part. They were thresholds. Rooms where possibility waited—quietly, patiently—for someone to enter and choose to remain.
In one frame, President Barack Obama and I converse in the Oval Office. It was the year 2009, and I had been summoned not for political alignment, but for intellectual contribution: a curriculum born from the crucible of my own learning disability. While others had trained to pass tests, I had trained to survive misunderstanding—to transform marginalization into method. My curriculum did not teach children what to know, but how to learn—how to metabolize complexity, how to own their intellect, even when the world mistook them for less.
President Obama listened, nodded, then spoke a sentence that still whispers through my conscience:
“What you’ve built has the power to teach children who’ve been forgotten how to remember their worth.”
In another panel, Congressman G.K. Butterfield appears—not beside me at the White House, but years later in quiet dignity, delivering a letter of commendation with his hallmark precision. Butterfield—a son of Wilson, NC, a judge of great jurisprudence, and a champion for voting rights—did not offer platitudes. He offered provocation.
“Equity,” he once told me, “is not empathy. It is architecture.”
And in his gaze I saw a blueprint.
And then there is Secretary Larry Hall, once a legislator, always a Marine. Hall taught me what it means to stand in unyielding formation before the chaos of a child’s world and declare order. To him, discipline was not cruelty, but choreography—a structure through which hope could dance.
But here is what matters most: none of these moments occurred in the same time or space. They are stitched together in a mosaic of mentorship, much like the lives we are called to uplift.
And now, in 2025, Durham bleeds.
Youth violence rages like an unchecked fever. Gangs become families where no fathers exist. Guns become gospels in communities left without curriculum or compassion. The very children I once sat beside in crowded cafeterias are now eulogized before they are even known.
Statistics tell us the truth we do not want to feel:
- 16 youth homicides in the first half of the year
- Gang recruitment beginning as young as age 10
- Over 3,000 youth disconnected from both school and employment
We are not dealing with bad kids.
We are facing abandoned blueprints.
So what do we do?
At the Courtney Jordan Foundation, we don’t issue condolences. We construct interventions.
We are expanding our Summer Transformation Hubs—learning sanctuaries disguised as joy:
- Curriculum that teaches thinking, not testing.
- Mentorship from those who survived what they’re surviving.
- Hot meals, yes. But also hope served hot—daily, undiluted, and free of bureaucracy.
We are forging partnerships with cities like Durham, Charlotte, and Rocky Mount—places bruised by disinvestment but not broken.
We are training mentors who see students not as projects, but as poetry in need of reading.
We are taking the very curriculum that brought me to the White House and putting it back where it belongs: in neighborhoods ignored by every other invitation.
Access and opportunity are not synonyms.
Access is a key.
Opportunity is the door it unlocks.
But the child still has to walk through.
And someone must be on the other side—waiting, welcoming, and whispering: “You belong.”
So yes, I post this collage again. Not for nostalgia. But as a map. A memory. A manifesto. And if even one young person sees in it the outline of their future, then let the world know: it is not the rooms you enter that define you—it is what you build after you’ve left them.
Let us build.
— Courtney Jordan