Dreama Caldwell never imagined herself an activist. But a sharp turn in her life led her to Down Home North Carolina. She started out as a volunteer, was hired on staff in 2020, and became co-director of the organization in 2021.
Down Home North Carolina was founded in 2017 with the goal of building community power among working-class people in small towns and rural parts of the state. The group is somewhat unusual in that it organizes exclusively in rural areas and prioritizes the development of leaderful members by offering them extensive training and opportunities to join the organization’s staff.
To date, Down Home has established chapters in nine counties, with plans to expand throughout the state. The chapters employ a two-pronged approach to building power. First, they run issue campaigns that pressure local boards to address community concerns. Second, they work to get local candidates elected whose policies will benefit working-class residents. In some cases they train and run their own candidates.
Although each chapter is headed by a full-time organizer, it is the members that determine the direction their organizing will take. Down Home does extensive canvassing and deep listening to determine each community’s biggest concerns. But rather than imposing ideological solutions, organizers follow the lead of community members, who know best what’s needed to solve their problems. Thus, the group’s politics are practical rather than partisan, although many of its positions that benefit working families are clearly progressive.
By knocking on thousands of doors and showing up at meetings of county commissioners, town councils and school boards, Down Home has already been able to create measurable change in the counties where they have chapters. For example, in Granville County they ran a successful campaign to fund the rehabilitation of a local park. They pressured officials to expand an eviction prevention program in Cabarrus County. And Down Home’s relentless canvassing has helped elect numerous community members to local offices, with some posts filled by African Americans for the first time.
Dreama Caldwell ran for Alamance County Commissioner in 2020, and although she lost the general election, she broke new ground as a Black woman by winning the primary in a county where local government is dominated by white men. In this interview by James L. VanHise, she explains how she became an activist, the importance of organizing locally in rural areas, and how Down Home is building a leadership pipeline that could help transform the political landscape in rural North Carolina.
James VanHise: How did you get involved with Down Home? Did you have a background in activism before that?
Dreama Caldwell: No, I didn’t. I’d spent 20 years in childcare and probably about 15 of those years were in childcare administration. I had an incident happen where a child was left on a bus at a daycare I was supervising. And that resulted in criminal charges for myself, the employee and the owner. I hadn’t experienced the system in that way. It started with a $40,000 cash bail, and my co-defendants didn’t have a bail at all.
And then going through the experience where I ended up having to take a plea deal, without really understanding what the consequences to taking that plea deal would be, and how it would affect my right to housing and my right to work a decent paying job and all of that.
So when I came out of that experience—probation, probation fees, all of those things—I was just looking for some organization or something that would help me figure out what happened and how do I move forward, because I was really struggling to basically live. And I was on Facebook one day and there was an ad that talked about working-class issues for people who lived in Alamance County, and they were asking to reach out and talk with people.
So I responded to the ad, and I met an organizer who came down to Mebane, where I lived at the time. And we had a whole conversation, and I was able to share what had just happened to me. And I remember Juan [Miranda] was the organizer. He just asked me, “What do you want to do about it? And I was like, “What do you mean? What can I do about it?”
Then he went on to tell me about this project Down Home, how it was brand new in Alamance County, and that they were looking to do multiracial movement building and build power. And I was just not sold with working with white people in Alamance County. Alamance County is still sort of divided by the railroad tracks between the haves and have nots and the Blacks and the whites. I hadn’t been in a place where I really had worked hand-to-hand with white folks like that.
And he was like, “Come to the office.” So I did go to the office and when I got there, they had butcher paper up on the wall where they had written out every single municipality—who was in charge; when their terms were up. I had voted every single year, but I did not know those people on the paper. And that’s how I kind of decided that this Down Home is where I needed to be.
So I joined as a member in 2017. The first issue campaign I was able to work on was about ending cash bail, where we were able to teach people in our community about cash bail and how it wasn’t necessarily about safety. [It] really was criminalizing poverty. So we did that, and we pissed off a few bail bondsmen in the county who showed up at our events. And that was my understanding of power in that moment when they showed up pissed off. I was like, oh, this is how you shift the narrative.…So for me, that was my first entrance into activism and really figuring out there is something you can do.
JV: Today everyone is focused on national politics and the presidential campaigns. But y’all are working with town councils and school boards at the hyperlocal level. Why are those things important to be involved with?
DC: It is the easiest level of government to co-govern with, to work with elected officials with, to be able to steer the decisions that happen in your community and to say where the money is used in your community. It’s much easier, because it is local, to be able to sit down and have meetings and to be involved, than it is at a federal level.
It’s the everyday issues, the things that are not partisan, like a pothole—that’s not partisan. Needing sidewalks in your neighborhood is not partisan. So those everyday things that touch people’s lives are much easier attacked at the local level. And then for someone who is not politicized to see changes at a local level, to see a school board flip, to see a city council change—that gives them hope and belief that we can do the same thing on a state or national level.
JV: About 80% of the US population lives in cities or suburban neighborhoods. Why should those people care about what happens in rural areas? Or should they?
DC: Well, I mean, just take North Carolina. North Carolina is the third most rural state in the country. Eighty out of a hundred counties are rural. So yeah, we have large cities, but what happens in the state really is determined by what happens in our rural counties. And so I think taking an interest in understanding that, to build statewide power, you have to include rural organizing.
And I think that is true for most of the country. A good part of our country is rural. I mean, even places like New York have lots of rural areas. They’re just not the parts of the country, or our state, that have seen deep investment.
And because of that, we’ve seen the Right play off that. We’ve seen them go in and organize those areas, because no one else is there, and fill those areas with misinformation. We don’t have strong local papers in those small and rural area towns. So, it’s really easy to move misinformation through those areas.
JV: Rural organizing seems to be more relational. Is it possible that one-on-one interactions are more effective in these areas than disruptive protests?
DC: Yeah. I would say they’re just as effective. I think one of the things that we have going on in a rural area, [that] makes our organizing easier is that we use people from the community. And so our canvassers literally will be like, this is my cousin, or I went to church with her; I went to school with her. In rural areas there may be only two high schools in the whole county. So people really know each other and are in relationships deeper with each other in smaller areas, which can be beneficial.
JVH: Down Home does a lot of training of both full-time organizers and volunteer members. Why do you think training is important?
DC: Leadership development is important. Down Home is a vehicle for leadership development, but the truth is that the real leaders are the people who live in the community. So if we can give them the skills to be able to lead and organize in their community, this is how we build a bigger “we”—not necessarily a bigger Down Home. I think our ultimate goal in the movement is to build a bigger “we.”
[Training] gives people an opportunity to do that. In the event that, for whatever reason, Down Home has to leave an area, that leadership development really matters because that work continues whether Down Home is there or not. And so growing leaders is an important part of building a movement. We want members to be able to run their chapters and steer their communities; to be able to give people those skills allows that work to continue.
JV: Down Home currently has chapters in nine counties, and you have plans to expand into more. Do you have any concern that at some point your organization might become too big, and lose touch with its grassroots constituents? This sometimes happens with large NGOs that fall into the trap of becoming overly bureaucratic.
DC: I think as you scale your organization, of course your operations have to scale as well. And so some of that just comes along with it. I think holding onto the grassroots comes down to our chapter culture. The culture of our chapters is making sure that our leaders are leading meetings and leading campaigns and able to bring in new folks. I think that is the key to it, which is why that leadership development is important, so that homegrown grassroots feeling within the chapter is able to continue.
Of course, as we grow, those things are going to feel a little more, I think you said bureaucratic, just because of the nature of running an operation this big statewide. But I think our local chapter culture is what really helps us hold on to that grassroots. And the strategic campaigns that we run are so hyperlocal, I think those things will help.
JV: Is there anything else that you would like to add?
DC: My story of moving through the organization is the story of a lot of our staff. Our Deep Canvass Manager—we met her on the door; we deep canvassed her. Then she came in as a volunteer and then she came in as staff and now she’s running the program. And I think we have that story over and over. Our field organizers—they were members, and they were canvassers.
So this leadership pipeline that we’re building is really like building…a generational intervention. The things that we’re planting now will have this generational effect, because we’re creating this pipeline.. It’s nothing for our canvassers to be out and about and their children have learned the script with them. And the children are so excited to show me that they’ve memorized the script. It’s just planting all these seeds of a movement that will continue to grow.
Going into these rural areas, where there isn’t anything, is creating this generational intervention in those areas that will go on a long time past Down Home. [This year] we’ve got 14 members running across the state from as far down as County Commissioner, Soil and Water, School Board, all the way up to House of Representatives of North Carolina and the North Carolina Senate. So that pipeline just keeps going.
Featured image: Members of Down Home North Carolina took a bus to Washington, DC to lobby for health care in 2019. Dreama Caldwell is the person on the left in front. Photo courtesy of Down Home North Carolina.