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Erin Dooley, M.A.

@erinvlashley

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📍: Durham, NC
💍: @dooley.kendall
✊🏾: Reverse Migrated @blksouth
🎓: Master of Community Leadership @edenseminary
✨: A Scholarly Practitioner

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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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#GrantStreetCommunity #Hayti #DurhamNC #FoodJustice #CommunityDevelopment taken in Durham, NC by @erinvlashley

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3 months ago

Happy birthday my love 🎉 You have a unique way of making people feel seen, safe, and loved no matter how old or young. I'm starting to realize that is your magic. That is the gift of what it means to be Kendall.

You are a brilliant thinker and writer and the world is better because you give yourself constantly to what makes you come alive. I'm so proud and privileged to be your wife!

Cheers to year 29! Happy birthday bb!!! 🥳🖤 taken in Europe by @erinvlashley

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a year ago

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 @erinvlashley

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10 days ago

Joshua Doss has a brilliant mind and perspective. This feels like poetry...just riveting. Thank you @doss.discourse 🔥 by @erinvlashley

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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 @erinvlashley

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a month ago

Last week I got to share my response to Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes’ Bracke Lecture at Eden Seminary — and honestly, I’m still taking it all in.

Womanist theology calls me deeper.
Into myself.
Into my story.
Into the South.
Into the kind of faith that forms people toward wholeness, not control.

I’m grateful for the teachers and thinkers who clear a path for folks like me to study, question, and create something new.

If this work resonates with you, follow along. There’s a lot unfolding in Durham, and I’m excited to bring people with me. 🖤🌿

#WomanistTheology #ChanequaWalkerBarnes #EdenSeminary #TheSouthIsSacred #BLKSouth #FaithAndJustice #BlackWomenTheologians #PersonalJourney taken in Eden Theological Seminary by @erinvlashley

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a year ago

BLK South co-founder Erin Dooley introduces our newest reflection, “Two Caged Birds”—a play on Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Watch to hear why Erin wrote the piece, then visit our website to read the full reflection and subscribe to the BLK South newsletter.

Link in bio.

#BLKSouth #TwoCagedBirds #CommunityCare #HousingJustice #DurhamNC taken in Durham, NC by @erinvlashley

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a month ago

A day I’ll never forget 🎓✨ So grateful for every person, lesson, late night, and leap of faith that carried me to this moment. From Phoenix to Durham and everywhere in between — we did it 🥹 taken in Eden Theological Seminary by @erinvlashley

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5 months ago

In Europe one final time this year for my brother’s destination wedding—grateful for the chance to be together and to pause for a moment in 🇨🇭Switzerland, a place I’ve always wanted to visit and where Kendall’s parents once came years ago. Using this time to celebrate his early birthday and our anniversary. 🥰

In a world that often feels like it’s falling apart, find small ways—wherever you are—to celebrate being alive.

Your life, your living, is an act of defiance against every system built to destroy you.

The trees once told me, “We just keep on living. Our existence—our living—defies the injustices that have come to our forests. Maybe one day those who destroyed us will reckon with their behavior...and until that day… we’ll just keep on living.”

Zürich carries a unique history. It was here that the Reformation took root under Ulrich Zwingli in the early 1500s—sparking one of the great turning points in church history. And centuries later, Switzerland’s decision to remain neutral through both world wars still stands as a reminder that sometimes strength looks like choosing peace. 🇨🇭 taken in Zürich, Switzerland by @erinvlashley

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a year ago

Cheers to my brother Erick and my sister Jocelyn (the kids call her Auntie Jo)! 💍🫶🏾 We love you all so much and are beyond thankful we could come together to celebrate your special day.

It’s a big deal when my whole family can be together 🥹 I tried to pick a few of the 1,000 photos we took for this special occasion, but honestly—this track and these clips say it best.

🎶 "You’re all I need…to get by...”

Grateful for family, and for the many who came before us to make moments like this possible. taken in Florence, Italy by @erinvlashley

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a year ago

THE Rev. Dr. Cassandra Gould speaking on being an architect of a new America at the @fianational conference in Pennsylvania. I truly believe she is one of the greatest orators of our time and we are absolutely SPOILED to have her on our board @blksouth. "We ought to just have a funeral on the 4th of July." 🔥🇺🇸👀 taken in Pennsylvania, USA by @erinvlashley

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4 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 @erinvlashley

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2 months ago