Tucked away in an unassuming building on Veasley Street, the Nehemiah Community Empowerment Center packs a big punch when it comes to education.
Twenty years ago, Randi Francis, Executive director at the center, moved to North Carolina from New York, New York, with a degree in Computer Science. A woman in STEM herself, she saw that the women around her were having trouble connecting to job opportunities in her field.
“I just went into a community that I knew needed help,” Randi explains.
With this mission, she opened the Nehemiah Community Empowerment Center to provide women with proper training to get jobs in STEM.
One of the center’s most popular courses is the A Plus Certification, an entry-level computer certification for PC computer service technicians. It trains students to install, maintain, customize, and operate PC’s. The other is CORE, a certification which is more hardware oriented.
Now the center offers services such as Apprenticeship Training and Workforce Development, Phenomenal Women in STEM, STEM Academy, and Virtual STEM after school.
“We’re educating the whole family unit,” Randi says.
The center also holds a summer camp for children, which went virtual when COVID-19 hit. However, it did not affect the number or enthusiasm of their campers.
“It was the ability for young girls to really get hands-on experience in building robots and coding and things of that nature,” Randi says on the camper’s curriculum.
The grants from Women to Women allowed the center to expand their outreach with children in the community. Operating on word of mouth advertising, the organization has been trying to increase awareness of their services.
To learn more about The Nehemiah Community Empowerment Center’s mission visit their website: be-a-nehemiah.org.
Author: Ellie Little almylittle.myportfolio.com