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Kendall Dooley, MMT, Th.M.

@dooley.kendall

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📍: Durham, NC
🖤: Married @erinvlashley
✊🏾: Reverse Migrated @blksouth
🎓: MA Missional Theology + ThM
💬: Scholarly Practitioner, Writer

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Happy 5th year anniversary bb 🥹🖤✨🥰🎊💍

I love you with my WHOLE heart and my whole heart feels SO loved by you 🫶🏾 taken in The Life We Build by @dooley.kendall

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11 days ago

#brickcommons #yourrealtorforallgenerations #firsttimehomebuyer #investor #1031
Charming 2 bedroom 2 bathroom condo close to museums, local restaurants, and so much more! taken in Phoenix, Arizona by @dooley.kendall

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a month ago

Help us give a warm BLK South welcome to our new field education intern, Michandra Washington! 👋🏾🎉

Michandra is joining us this school year as a student from Duke Divinity School. Field education gives students the opportunity to connect what they are learning in the classroom with hands-on ministry, community engagement, theological reflection, and vocational formation.

Throughout the year, Michandra will serve alongside BLK South's Hyper-Local work as we build out an after-school program for children and families in our neighborhood in partnership with Grant Street Community, Russell Memorial CME Church, and Monument of Faith Church.

We are honored to have Michandra with us and look forward to a meaningful and formative year of learning, service, and building together.

Drop a warm hello for Michandra in the comments! 👋🏾

#BLKSouth #DukeDivinity #FieldEducation #Hayti #GrantStreetCommunity taken in Durham, NC by @dooley.kendall

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a month ago

✨ Our Weekly Reflections are back. ✊🏾
After a season of reverse migrating to Durham, putting down roots, and stepping deeper into the work of community, we’re returning to the practice of pausing to reflect — together.

This week, Kendall Dooley writes on Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers and the generational wounds we carry in our bodies, our churches, and our nation:

“Our fathers have given us this practice of patriarchy and racism that remains in our country and in a lot of our churches today. The violent and unjust acts we witness in our world are symptoms of this illness that hides behind American exceptionalism. However, this history reveals, like Kendrick’s song, that this is a generational problem—and our past ‘fathers’ were formed by environments that caused them to harm others.” — Kendall Dooley

We share these reflections not just to talk about what’s broken, but to imagine healing, to remember, and to walk each other toward wholeness.

📖 Read this week’s reflection and subscribe at [link in bio] to journey with us.

#BLKSouth #WeeklyReflections #GenerationalHealing #BlackTheology #CommunityHealing #SacredSouth taken in Durham, NC by @dooley.kendall

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a year ago

Grateful to be in Rome with Street Psalms, learning about mimetic theory, rivalry, scapegoating, and what it means to preach peace in a world marked by violence. Stepping out in faith to start something new with BLK South has been scary—but it’s also opened doors we never imagined, including this one!

Honestly, we never thought we’d find ourselves in Rome this year. But being here with this community has been such a gift. In many ways, it feels like studying abroad through the lens of community development.

We just shared a reflection on the experience so far and what it’s stirring in us. 🔗 in bio!

Looking forward to being back home in Durham next week! taken in Rome, Italy by @dooley.kendall

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a year ago

I don't write much poetry except for when I spend time in nature and reflect. Here's a poem I wrote today:

"Karasu"

I am the crow, and the crow is me.

Not just because the crow is Black,
but because in another world—one not too far away—
the crow is magical

Sent from God as a messenger,
guiding others to divine truth.

Some say the crow is a harbinger of death,
a shadow that warns of demise.
And maybe that’s true—
but only because truth has always been a warning.

Perhaps we should listen to the crow,
embrace its message,
instead of lending our ears to the ordinary Jim.

We should give more space for the crow to speak,
because the crow carries wisdom that was never meant for cages.

The crow can teach us.
The crow can teach me.

There is much I can learn from the crow—
how to stretch my wings wide,
to claim the sky.

The crow is my actualized potential,
my body—no longer burden, but blessing.

I am the crow, and the crow is me.

Because the crow is Black.

#poetry #bhm #blksouth

🎥: Bird Academy—Welcome to the Hidden Life of the American Crow on YouTube

🎧: Dreaming by Austin Farwell taken in Durham, North Carolina by @dooley.kendall

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2 years ago

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

In When History Rhymes, BLK South co-founder Kendall Dooley reflects on the courage required to recognize the patterns echoing from our past, name harmful rhythms in the present, and imagine new rhythms that can lead us toward healing.

This semester, our weekly reflections will explore aphorisms, quotations, and proverbs that have shaped and stayed with us. You’ll hear from BLK South board members and members of our broader community as they reflect on the words that inform their lives, faith, and work.

Subscribe to the BLK South newsletter so you don’t miss a reflection—and join us as we listen for the wisdom carried through words, history, and community.

🔗 Subscribe at blksouth.org or use the link in bio. by @dooley.kendall

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2 months ago

📰 Grant Street Community is in the news again!

We’re grateful to be featured in The News & Observer by reporter Luke Bowles (@bowlesbugs) — marking the second news feature highlighting Grant Street Community and our growing advocacy to bring a Black-owned grocery store to historic Hayti.

Our neighborhood is considered a food desert. For many of our neighbors, accessing fresh, healthy food means leaving the neighborhood altogether — a reality shaped by generations of displacement, disinvestment, and inequity.

As Duke University’s Edible Atlas Lab uses wastewater research to better understand food access and nutrition in our community, we’ve been asking an important question: How can research move beyond studying communities and actually become a tool for their advocacy and flourishing?

As Erin shared in the article, “We don’t really need research to prove what we already know.” We live the realities the data seeks to describe. But research can become powerful when it helps bring institutional credibility, attention, and resources alongside what residents have already been saying.

And right now, our neighborhood is saying clearly: Hayti needs a grocery store.

We’re grateful to Luke Bowles and The News & Observer for helping tell this story, and to Dr. Lawrence David and the Edible Atlas team for being willing to wrestle with what it means for research to serve the communities it touches.

Two news features later, we’re grateful that more people are hearing what our neighbors have been advocating for — but the goal isn’t simply more attention or better data. The goal is investment, access, and a neighborhood where our people can flourish for generations to come. 🌱

“How are we disrupting systems that are created for harm to create ways where we can flourish as a neighborhood for the long haul?” — Erin Dooley

#GrantStreetCommunity #BLKSouth #Hayti #DurhamNC #FoodJustice BlackDurham CommunityDevelopment taken in Durham, North Carolina by @dooley.kendall

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2 months ago

We ended up in The New York Times... but that's not the story. 📰👀

Back in April, Kendall and I attended our neighborhood's District 4 PAC meeting, where we heard Dr. Lawrence David and members of Duke's Edible Atlas Lab share about their research.

After the meeting, we reached out to introduce ourselves and asked if they would be interested in partnering with our neighborhood and several of our community partners.

We shared that for the last 30 years, the Grant Street Ladies and Bishop Laney of Monument of Faith Church organized for the development of the 21-acre Villages of Hayti affordable housing project.

Now, our neighbors have been advocating for a full-service grocery store in the historic Hayti District, but that there was still a $6 million funding gap preventing the grocery store from opening with the new development.

The question was simple: Can your research help us advocate for what our neighborhood truly needs?

Rather than research existing for over exploitation, we asked what it might look like for it to be used to tell the story of why access to healthy, affordable food matters and why Hayti deserves the same investment as every other neighborhood.

I never imagined that just four months later, that conversation would lead to The New York Times featuring both the Edible Atlas Lab's research and its collaboration at the neighborhood level with the Grant Street Community in the historic Hayti District.

I'm deeply grateful to Dr. Lawrence David and the entire Edible Atlas Lab team, our Grant Street neighbors, Monument of Faith Church, and everyone who has contributed to this work.

The story may be making national headlines, but our hope is that this attention helps move us one step closer to what our neighbors have been asking for all along: a grocery store, healthy food access, and continued investment in the historic Hayti District for the people who never left.

The work continues. 🖤
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.
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#GrantStreetCommunity #Hayti #DurhamNC #FoodJustice #CommunityDevelopment taken in Durham, NC by @dooley.kendall

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3 months ago

Thankful for friends and partners like @imchristinenolf @redemptionoc across the country who understand and value placed-based work—and how our stories speak to one another across places and communities.

It was especially fun to get a surprise visit from Sami DiPasquale from El Paso, Texas, who leads a powerful pilgrimage experience at the U.S.-Mexico border @abarafrontiers. All of these folks share deep roots in community development and are living out the philosophy of investing in people and place.

We had a wonderful time in Costa Mesa, sharing updates from @blksouth @grantstdurham and screening the Grant Street Documentary. We reflected on how our community's history connects with theirs, how the stories of neighborhoods are deeply connected, and what we might do about it together.

On some level...we're boosters iykyk 😉 taken in Costa Mesa, California by @dooley.kendall

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4 months ago

Our 2025 Annual Report is here.

This past year was full of listening, tending, showing up, and doing the slow work of building something meant to last.

Our annual report is one way we practice accountability and care. Inside, you’ll find how resources were stewarded, what partnerships shaped our work, and how our vision for place-based healing continues to take form.

Thank you to every neighbor, partner, and supporter who walked with us this year. This work belongs to all of us.

📄 Read the full report at the link in our bio. taken in Durham, North Carolina by @dooley.kendall

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9 months ago

What if the wisdom we need for our communities isn’t found in certainty, but in curiosity? What if the most faithful work we can do is keep learning — not to reinforce what we've inherited, but to make room for what we have yet to imagine?

In our newest reflection, BLK South Co-Founder @kendallldooley names this invitation with clarity and gentleness:

“Learning—and the sources from which we gather knowledge—is a lifelong journey. It involves unlearning, relearning, discovering new ways of knowing, and rejecting past ones that no longer serve us or our community. Some truths are better discovered than told.”

This week’s piece sits at the intersection of theology, culture, and formation — asking how we might loosen our grip on dominant frameworks and listen again to the wisdom of land, ancestors, and marginalized storytellers.

If the South is sacred ground, then so is the process of expanding how we know what we know. taken in Durham, NC by @dooley.kendall

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10 months ago