A national network of funders supporting strategic, innovative, and effective solutions to homelessness

Tabitha Blackwell

Director of Networks and Programs
she/her/hers

TB_Headshot

Tabitha was born and raised in Roxboro, North Carolina.  Growing up in a small town, she learned the importance of community.  Her long time dream of being a lawyer led her to college at Campbell University. Looking back, she thinks the smartest thing she has ever done was taking a year off before heading to law school. Instead, she worked as a case manager for youth 9 to 18 years old in Baltimore for an AmeriCorps program. Tabitha took this as an opportunity before dedicating her life to public interest law to get to know the people she desperately wanted to help. However, the more she worked with the youth and their families, the more she knew the nonprofit sector was where she wanted to be. 

Now, eleven years later, Tabitha has had the chance to work for some great nonprofits with great missions, including KaBOOM!, Goodwill Industries International, and Reading Partners. Each of these organizations had missions dedicated to improving the lives of youth and their families. Each of those families similar to those that she had worked with in Baltimore. However, Tabitha found herself increasingly interested in helping to build the capacity of organizations to more effectively serve their youth, families, and communities. 

Most recently, she returned to her homestate of North Carolina to accept a position as Director of Chapel Hill-Carrboro Youth Forward. Chapel Hill-Carrboro Youth Forward supports local organizations helping young people (ages 5-20) develop into career and college ready citizens by distributing grant funds, providing technical assistance, and facilitating networking opportunities and collaborations. Tabitha believes that building healthy nonprofits helps create strong communities. This belief is echoed in her work every day. 

 

We joined Funders Together because we believe in the power of philanthropy to play a major role in ending homelessness, and we know we have much to learn from funders across the country.

-Christine Marge, Director of Housing and Financial Stability at United Way of Greater Los Angeles

I am thankful for the local partnerships here in the Pacific Northwest that we’ve been able to create and nurture thanks to the work of Funders Together. Having so many of the right players at the table makes our conversations – and all of our efforts – all the richer and more effective.

-David Wertheimer, Deputy Director at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

-President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964 State of the Union Address

Funders Together has given me a platform to engage the other funders in my community. Our local funding community has improved greatly to support housing first models and align of resources towards ending homelessness.

-Leslie Strnisha, Vice President at Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland

Our family foundation convenes local funders and key community stakeholders around strategies to end homelessness in Houston. Funders Together members have been invaluable mentors to us in this effort, traveling to our community to share their expertise and examples of best practices from around the nation.

-Nancy Frees Fountain, Managing Director at The Frees Foundation


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