Group’s leader steps up for NC homeless
As people hunkered down during an early January storm, BeLoved Asheville was gearing up. Armed with winter coats, insulated tents and warming gear, nonprofit co-director Amy Cantrell and her team were out driving backroads and major corridors. The Jan. 9 deluge dumped 3 to 6 inches of rain across western North Carolina, rivers pushing past their banks, wind tossing trees, water rending bridges and closing roads.
Driving the streets, Cantrell said they found someone whose only protection against the heavy rain was a zip-up sweatshirt.
“BeLoved is in the eye of the storm,” Cantrell said someone told her once. And that day, it felt almost literal as they looked for people camped along banks or poorly sheltered against the cold.
As flood threats increased, Cantrell was reminded of 2021’s Tropical Storm Fred, which wreaked havoc on western North Carolina, killing six people.
Her own family was displaced from their home during that flood. They came to the Land of Sky Church to seek shelter, the same property where Cantrell is spending much of her time lately, working on a project that puts housing – and community – at its center.
BeLoved Village is a small neighborhood of 12 tiny homes in East Asheville. Cantrell, 51, sees it as part of the solution to Asheville’s burgeoning housing crisis, targeting deep affordability for those earning 30% to 40% of the area median income. She intends for the model to be replicable. With the homes slated for occupation in the first half of 2024, BeLoved already is searching for more land to do it all again.
BeLoved began in 2009. The nonprofit was created to fill a gap: to be an organization focused on community building that would offer support, outreach and advocacy from a vantage point within the population it serves.
“We want to know people in a significant way. Building those relationships over time, in a community, is what holds most of us together,” Cantrell said. “We call it the invisible glue.”
Cantrell has a history of activism and peaceful civil disobedience with protests around racial justice, the fight for marriage equality and police accountability.
BeLoved’s work includes a focus on food access, such as its free pantries throughout the city; street outreach; racial equity; community organizing; direction intervention, financial or otherwise; and housing.
The impetus for the group’s formation came in 2015, in the wake of the “Bowen Report,” a housing-needs assessment that for many confirmed the depths of the city’s housing crisis. Standing on the steps of Asheville’s downtown civic center, they agreed: their voices had been left out.
Cantrell said it affirmed her goal of centering the voices of those most impacted by the housing crisis in the discussion for solutions.
“We don’t want to just sit in rooms and talk anymore, we want to be actually creating the thing that we need,” Cantrell said.
Cantrell’s leadership and service are why she is North Carolina’s 2024 USA TODAY Woman of the Year honoree.
Answers have been edited for clarity and length.
Question: Who paved the way for you?
Answer: I had some incredible mentors. All women. Really incredible mentors. I had a college chaplain (Susie Smith) who was also in charge of all the student volunteer services, which fell under that office at Converse College where I went to school. She literally called together a whole group of us that she had met individually and really saw us as (people who) would be powerful in connection with each other. So we started working in community service and doing statewide advocacy around housing.
(Smith) said something that I always thought was really interesting and certainly fed the work of BeLoved. I saw her the summer before I went into my senior year. She looked at me and said, “I’ve cursed you.” And I said, “What?” And she said, “Because now you know what community feels like and you’ve experienced it and you’ll never be OK without it.”
I really credit that experience. She created a community of people who were committed to something bigger than us.
What advice would you give your younger self?
I’ve been teaching at UNC Asheville as a guest lecturer in a women’s studies class, and it’s all about activism and community. So I get to speak to my younger self.
It was in that class ... that I was saying to them: (When I was young) I was longing to do these really big things, I felt there was something coming, and I was trying to lean into that. I kept thinking, “it’s down the road.”
Now I look back, and I was doing what I’m doing now, even back then. I was really lucky to know really early on, my late teens, that I wanted to work in these arenas and it’s led me to be able to trailblaze in a lot of ways. I was planting those seeds. Being able to encourage them to nurture their passions and their gifts and really wield those toward the biggest struggles of our time, because the world needs you. It needs you right now. Not 20 years from now when you think, “Oh, I’m going to be somebody.”
You can change things really powerfully.
“We want to know people in a significant way. Building those relationships over time, in a community, is what holds most of us together. We call it the invisible glue.”
Is there a guiding principle or mantra you tell yourself?
Community is certainly the guiding principle, and there’s lots of values that come under that, if you look at mutuality or the exchange of needs and gifts.
When we used to just be a community gathering in a small house, and now we’ve far exceeded the bounds of that, but I used to say, “Everyone that comes through the door has needs and gifts, and if we share them well, miracles will happen.”
This mantra of intention is a big part of our community. Of putting love into action.