Our Story

About Our Community

The West Marion community is a predominantly Black, Brown, and multi-racial neighborhood located in McDowell County, NC. The West Marion neighborhood has suffered from unjust policies related to racial segregation, urban renewal, and housing discrimination. For example, when McDowell County Schools were racially integrated in 1965, our beloved African-American school, known as the Mountain View School, was closed. Our community tried to preserve this important cultural space by making a formal request to county leaders to convert the school into a community center, but the request was denied and the building was sold to a manufacturing company. Two decades later, in 1989, the NC Department of Transportation, working with local officials, constructed a four-lane federal highway (U.S. 221) that divided the heart of our community and destroyed Black owned businesses, homes, and neighborhoods. Despite these injustices, our community has always banded together to support one another through mutual aid networks, faith groups, and multi-generational family ties that have helped us to survive during times of racial oppression and hardship.

The birth of our community forums in 2016

The West Marion community is a predominantly Black, Brown, and multi-racial neighborhood located in McDowell County, NC. In 2016, a historic turning point happened in our community when the McDowell Health Coalition and Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust engaged neighborhood leaders from West Marion in the Healthy Places North Carolina Initiative, a 10-year, $100 million initiative to improve the health and overall quality of life for people in rural NC counties. They selected our neighborhood to pilot monthly community forums to engage those with lived experiences in solution oriented discussions to address health, racial, economic, and environmental inequities. Over the course of a year, we met monthly and engaged in brave conversations to identify our strengths, analyze our challenges, and co-create community action plans. As a result, we began to trust our voices, see our collective power, and get organized to advance policy and system changes in our town.

The lAUNCH OF OUR NONPROFIT in 2018

Two years later, in 2018, we founded our nonprofit, West Marion, Inc., which takes its place in history as our rural county’s first Black-led nonprofit. Ultimately, our goal is to right historical wrongs and bring visibility to the vision, wisdom, and strength of rural changemakers that live in our county. To date, our nonprofit has facilitated over 200 community meetings with grassroots and traditional leaders to analyze our challenges, create a shared vision for change, and foster a multiracial movement for health equity and racial justice. Through these efforts, we have rebuilt a sense of pride in our community, developed a pipeline for new and diverse grassroots leadership to emerge across our city and county, and generated over 10 million dollars worth of investments into our community-led priorities related to housing, transportation, childcare, food security, recreation, and healthcare.