Talethia Edwards, an advocate for Tallahassee, Florida’s south-side neighborhood, is a force to be reckoned with. A woman who once thought her house would be a “flip and rent” now lives in the same 4 bedroom house with a family of 11 after 14 years. Talethia Edwards believes that building a sustainable community means considering the whole ecosystem - the families, the businesses, the schools, etc. And instead of leaving her crime-filled, under-performing neighborhood, she dug her heels in and encouraged others to be the change they want to see.
Edwards attended Florida A&M University and later bought a home with her husband nearby. Along the way, she realized her many neighbors were struggling, and she began buying single parents and other neighbors extra clothes and food.
Soon she was attending community meetings, completed the City of Tallahassee’s neighborhood leadership academy and formed the Greater Bond Neighborhood Association. In an interview with the Tallahassee Democrat, she was quoted saying, “I would hear the word ‘sustainability’ in conversations about community. But sustainability is not just about trees and the environment… It is about being part of what sustains a community.”
In order to take the real pulse of her neighborhood, she and others on the neighborhood association began surveying and listing neighborhood demographics. They soon learned most residents were just over 25 and 89% of households were led by single mothers. The unemployment rate among residents was almost 19% percent.
Edwards and her husband felt a strong conviction to remain in their neighborhood and stated about her decision, “If I moved my stable two-parent family out of the neighborhood, that would be the opposite of sustainability.”
But Edwards has gone above and beyond sustainability doing things like adopting a child left on her doorstep. They called the little boy our “Community Baby Boy.” Then, in 2020, her neighbors started a fundraising campaign to add onto her house because they knew how tight a four-bedroom home was for 11 family members.
In several interviews, Edwards has expressed how difficult it has been for the community to be sustainable when there are so many struggling, single-parent homes. She has said what a benefit it would be to have more financially secure two-parent families in the neighborhood. And we as readers are wowed by Talethia Edwards because of how uncommon her choices were. She chose to stay in a community with higher crime rates and substandard schools, and she seems like a saint because of it.
But for Talethia Edwards’ vision of a sustainable neighborhood to be realized, she’s right, there needs to be more financially diverse families in her neighborhood. How does somebody like Edwards draw middle class working families to her community? Learn more about this concept here, where we discuss how education policy can be an economic development catalyst for neighborhoods like Talethia Edwards’ community.