WELCOME
RECOGNITION
First Ward Community Center Honors A Worthy Volunteer
Being a civic volunteer
means devoting hours of your life to committee meetings
where people sometimes wrangle interminably over picky
things. Sometimes you suffer through sleep-inducing
agendas, other times you maneuver through hair-raising
political minefields. You must manage cries that insist on
erupting when they are most inconvenient.
You do all this without pay and, often without recognition.
So it’s a pleasure when a long-time civic volunteer wins
acclaim and gratitude. That happened Wednesday at the new
Carole A. Hoefener Community Services Center was dedicated
in uptown’s First Ward neighborhood.
The center, a joint
project between the Charlotte Housing Authority and the
Mecklenburg
Park and Creation Department, is a 36,000 square-foot
building that includes a child care center,
a gymnasium,
recreational areas and a multipurpose room.
Carole Hoefener Carriker,
for whom it is named (who got married in 1996 and amiably
answers to “Hoefener” or “Carriker”), has been a civic
stalwart for 20 years. While she was chair of the Charlotte
Housing Authority, it received the federal grant to remake
the Earle Village housing project into a mixed-income
neighborhood where public housing residents working toward
self-sufficiency will live next door to middle-income
families.
Ms. Carriker’s
involvement went deeper than attending meetings. She rode
with police through housing authority neighborhoods to
understand problems residents faced. She pushed to give
tenants a voice. She mentored a young woman who earned a
Charlotte Housing Authority Scholarship and graduated from
college. She set up community meetings to ease tensions
over scattered-site public housing. And she applied her
expertise as an architect during the planning and building
of First Ward’s new construction. Notably, she did some of
this work even while being treated for cancer, making phone
calls from her hospital bed.
Charlotte as we know it
today would be a lesser place without the contributions of
hundreds of dedicated volunteers such as Ms. Carriker. The
building that carries her name should help remind us all
that
individuals can, in truth, make a difference in the
world.
Reprinted: Charlotte Observer-Friday,
March 5, 1999
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