Cecile Crawford Aims to Go From Organizer to Council

Cecile Crawford is known in the community for her organizing and activism around social issues such as housing and tenants’ rights. But she’s not just an organizer, she told The Thread.

“I’m a resident, I’m a mother, I’m a worker,” Crawford said. “When you come from communities in need, you have to organize. There’s no way around it. An advocate or an activist can go up and yell and say some of the best things. But an organizer is someone who goes to the community, who knocks on the doors, who has conversations, who listens to what people are saying, builds coalitions, has to learn how to convey ideas and needs.”

In 2022, Crawford ran against incumbent Goldie Wells, a fellow Democrat, for the District 2 seat on the Greensboro City Council and came within 120 votes of unseating her. With Wells retiring this year, the District 2 seat is open—and Crawford is one of five candidates vying for it.

Her long experience as an organizing voice for her community makes her an ideal fit on council, Crawford argues.

She is a member of the American Friends’ Service Committee and vice chair of the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission. She helped secure millions in funding for the TEAM Program, a tenants’ rights organization that works directly with people facing eviction, offering legal representation, mediation services, and help with rental assistance applications.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why do you want a seat on the city council?

I was born and brought home to Pearson Street, which is in the Douglas Park area. My mother was in college at the time, so my grandparents did a lot of the raising. During the day, I would go with my grandmother to get groceries and run errands. My grandfather had the car. He was a professor at Bennett College and N.C. A&T. So we would have to walk to the bus, take the bus, ride over to Friendly, to the Winn-Dixie over there, and get groceries. But what we needed wasn’t in our community.

My grandfather had a little store over on the hill. But the reason he opened it was to provide milk and cheese and bread, things that we couldn’t get in our community.

When I got older and went out on my own, I made some choices that landed me as being a single mom, struggling for housing. I’ve stayed in some really awful conditions. I just really understand that housing is really hard in Greensboro. We’ve done a lot of organizing around housing, around wages, labor, around childcare, around healthcare, like all of these indicators that have impacts on families. We’ve been to the city council to essentially beg them for the things that we need. And we’re at their mercy, right? Like half of the time we get it, and half of the time we don’t. It feels really hard as a working-class person to not have someone that represents you on the council.

What changes are you hoping to bring to District 2?

There are a lot of historically Black colleges and universities [HBCUs] in my district. We have a lot of students that we want to be able to keep here in Greensboro to help bring in that breath of fresh air, those new ideas, and the only way that we’re gonna be able to do that is around housing, right?

Student housing is limited on campus …  We had at least 12-15 N.C. A&T college students that were a part of the court watch, and they had to watch their peers being evicted, only to find out that some of our own court watchers were facing evictions, worried about if they were going to be able to pay for their rent, because the financial aid refund checks were late because of the [President Donald Trump] administration. Like, all of this is one big circle, right? But outside of that, some of the most predatory housing goes after those students, right? 
And that leads to what I want to do around code enforcement. 

The other thing is city worker wages, especially our classified workers, folks who are with parks and rec, water and sewer. Most folks need at least a $25 minimum wage. (Editor’s note: The city currently pays its workers a minimum of $20/hr) That’s the least that anyone could survive on, and as the city, we need to make sure that we are paying our own folks well. And if we do, it carries across the city to other organizations and businesses. 

What do you believe are the most important issues facing Greensboro?

Housing, number one. Go back to that equitable distribution of low-income housing. It cannot all be built in Districts 1 and 2. We don’t have the infrastructure. Around housing, the second thing is the infrastructure needed for all of the different communities. The third thing is youth work … looking for more programming at parks and rec, community safety, tutoring, and mentoring to help bring kids who are behind up to the level that they should be, and reading comprehension. It gives kids some kind of vision of a future that they’ve not seen.

In my community, our kids need therapy. There is trauma associated with poverty. And if we want them to leave behind the poverty mindset, really embrace that they can be everything that they can be, and we provide those opportunities so that they can be everything that they possibly can be.

That older group, the ones that are leaving home and dragging college student loan debt, really working hard to listen to them, to have them at the table and help work towards what they see are ways that the city can help them, or coordinate with the community in ways that support them in thriving. We need a compassionate government. It’s basically what encompasses all of that. 

Recently, the city of Durham passed a resolution making Durham a “Fourth Amendment Workplace,” increasing protections for city workers against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and arrests. What’s your position on what the council’s role is related to ICE and deportation?

When I first got to AFSC [American Friends Service Committee], it was around the time that a military contractor was paying the Hebrew Academy to turn it into a child detention center. We organized with other organizations and other hopes in the immigrant community to keep that thing shut down. We call ourselves a welcoming city, right? 
And that is not the way that we want to welcome people here. And I think Siembra and other organizations that are organizing around Fourth Amendment workplaces is good work. 

What are your thoughts on city spending when it comes to the Greensboro Police Department?

The council has been very lenient when it comes to the police. The city of Greensboro budget is not infinite. I think that if we address many of the root causes, we wouldn’t need to depend on punishment as much. One of the things that I hate to hear or see is the police showing up for mental health issues. And so I know that there is BHRT, [Behavioral Health Response Team, which pairs mental health professionals with police officers to respond to mental health crises], I’ve actually had the occasion in my community to see how well they work. But I do know that the police showing up in all their full gear does not de-escalate a situation.

I would like to see BHRT extricated from the police department and more money funding that program, and being more efficient in addressing mental health issues … I know that my community wants [police], and so we will keep them funded until we can address the root causes of why we are seeing gun violence and theft and all of the things that scare people who are asking for the police. But I don’t believe in consistently increasing their budget when we’re not seeing a return on our investment.

Increasing the police budget hasn’t made us more safe. And then the thing that I want from the police is, rather than driving through our ways with their tinted windows, it feels like we’re prey to have someone riding through your neighborhood with dark windows. It doesn’t feel good. So if they get the heck out of those cars and walk through the community and have conversations with the community and get to know the community, then I think the results would be better. 

How do you think the city should be addressing housing and homelessness?

[More than 16,000] households face evictions every year.
And if you go and talk to folks at the Interactive Resource Center, you go and talk to folks downtown, so many of them were evicted. I think if we’re in the trenches, the first thing that we need to do is take some of the unused units across the city and figure out the housing first model. We need transitional housing that includes a clinic and social workers, because the longer that you are on the streets, the harder it is to re-enter regular society. 

The “Road to 10,000” sounds great, right?
[The city initiative to create 10,000 new housing units by 2030.] It’s a great tagline, but it needs some real strategy behind it. 
When we are talking about this “Road to 10,000,” we’ll always be chasing that 10,000 if we don’t find a way to hold non-compliant landlords accountable and we’ll keep losing units.

The federal and state governments are moving in such a way that the city and county are going to be forced to support residents in ways that are going to strain the budget. I think that if we can lead the city, in compassion, intentionality, and with a strategy, if we can understand that we can’t get every new and cute thing to bring to Greensboro, the most important thing right now is taking care of our citizens, putting people first.