Who is Carmen Cauthen?

She’s a thinker and has been all her life.  Her father said that when she was young, her favorite thing to say was WHY? And, that hasn’t changed.

A brilliant researcher and writer, Carmen digs deep for the clues AND the answers to the things that either puzzle her or that she didn’t know.  And, she knows that if she can answer a question for herself, then she is answering it for somebody else as well.

The thing that she learned from her mother was that when she speaks up for herself, she is speaking up for somebody who either didn’t know how or was afraid to do so.  So, she advocates for herself, her family and others.

Not only an advocate around housing and TRUTH, Carmen recognizes that everything that we do is affected by the systems around us.  And we don’t always know the truth that created the systems – so we keep patching them trying to fix things that are broken instead of digging up the roots of the system to create something better.

Personally, Carmen grew up in the 1960s, her family moving into an all-white neighborhood when she was 10, the year after the Fair Housing Act was passed. As a young Black girl (and the only girl in the neighborhood), she spent a lot of time alone and never felt like she fit in with either race. She became fascinated with houses being built near them as well as questioning (always) the reasons that the family moved there. One of her refuges was reading and reading biographies in particular. The other was the comfort of having a large family surrounding her and hearing stories of who they were and what they accomplished.

It wasn’t until well into adulthood, after working at the NC General Assembly writing the Journal for the House of Representatives, that she recognized how much her life had revolved around the history of things.  Watching her mother advocate for education rights for all as a member of the Raleigh and Wake County School Board, helping her father at his drug store serve people of all incomes during segregation and afterwards, being one of four Black students at her elementary school and walking to school with white children and watching Black students being bussed in, Cauthen has had a front row seat to history and to learning how to work together in situations where dealing with race is first and foremost.

The TRUTH of history isn’t always pleasant or comfortable but it is necessary.  Carmen shines the light of the TRUTH on many things including communities, housing, education, environmental work and so on – based on her personal experiences.

What she knows is that the TRUTH of our country’s history is many-faceted and all of the pieces have never been told.  Many of the pieces are in the details of our family memories – places that we really don’t share and often don’t know.  And so, she helps each person to unpack their family history using memories as well as genealogy, so that we all gain a better understanding of the TRUTH of our joined history.

As she often says, “my history is our history”, and she teaches that TRUTH one person at a time – all the while asking, WHY, and making you ask it as well.

A Peek Into Our Process…