Community Builders Network

We’re honored to be a part of annually celebrating the Community Builders Network of Metropolitan St. Louis awardees! Check out the award recipients from over the years — a dedicated group of STL residents who bring their leadership, passion, and expertise to our region in countless ways. We hope the stories from these profiles serve as a reminder of the dedication, creative problem solving, and impact that’s happening in St. Louis and why community building work is so important.

“My son is 17, but when he was a kid, several large anchor stores in our neighborhood started closing. There were these massive empty buildings in our neighborhood and he and I would ride past them and play this game: I would ask him, ‘What would you open there? What kind of business would you put in that building? What would it look like?’ He was a kid in elementary school at the time and he always came up with some cool ideas. He thought of a Chuck E. Cheese or something similar to Monkey Joe’s or Sky Zone. We didn’t have anything like that in our neighborhood or on our side of town at all. He’d say, ‘We can put that here! And what if we had a go-cart place? Mom, there’d be pizza and a Subway!’ It was so cute. As he'd just think of stuff I’d ask, ‘Who would work there?’ and he’d name people in our family. There we were, a legal aid attorney and an elementary student, making stuff up. We didn’t have the resources or skills to do any of it, but, ‘It would be really cool if we could turn that old Lowes into a rock climbing gym!’ At that time, the only thing I knew about development was that you needed people with capital to come in and create businesses. So we’d just dream about how we could make a Magic House in North County and North City. Then all the kids who went to school in Kirkwood could come over to our neighborhood and play in the castles over here.”Latasha Barnes, Attorney with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri — “My son is 17, but when he was a kid, several large anchor stores in our neighborhood started closing. There were these massive empty buildings in our neighborhood and he and I would ride past them and play this game: I would ask him, ‘What would you open there? What kind of business would you put in that building? What would it look like?’ He was a kid in elementary school at the time and he always came up with some cool ideas. He thought of a Chuck E. Cheese or something similar to Monkey Joe’s or Sky Zone. We didn’t have anything like that in our neighborhood or on our side of town at all. He’d say, ‘We can put that here! And what if we had a go-cart place? Mom, there’d be pizza and a Subway!’ It was so cute. As he'd just think of stuff I’d ask, ‘Who would work there?’ and he’d name people in our family. There we were, a legal aid attorney and an elementary student, making stuff up. We didn’t have the resources or skills to do any of it, but, ‘It would be really cool if we could turn that old Lowes into a rock climbing gym!’ At that time, the only thing I knew about development was that you needed people with capital to come in and create businesses. So we’d just dream about how we could make a Magic House in North County and North City. Then all the kids who went to school in Kirkwood could come over to our neighborhood and play in the castles over here.”
Latasha Barnes, Attorney with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri

“You can’t do it all. Community building means so much. The definition is so broad. It’s important to remember to stay in your lane and focus on things you can have an impact on through your expertise. Don’t get distracted by the things you can’t control. I’ve learned, although I haven’t always embraced it, that change is slow. I follow politics as a frustrating side hobby, and change doesn’t happen overnight. I keep in mind that you can’t just abandon places. Places are going to exist whether you invest in them or not, so why not invest in them? And I’ve also learned that we can too easily let the noise get in, especially local noise, so I try to not get bogged down by the noise of the news. Like, ‘Oh my gosh, there is so much violence and crime,’ and the 30,000-foot belief is that communities are just that way. But we’re talking about people who have lives there. I remember at another job, someone told me, ‘You’re sending me into this neighborhood, but is it safe for me to go there and do a credit fair?’ I said, ‘You’re probably gonna pass kids waiting for the school bus. It’s going to be 8 a.m. This is where families are raising their kids. Remember that.’”Nikki Woelfel, Vice President of Community Development, Carrollton Bank — “You can’t do it all. Community building means so much. The definition is so broad. It’s important to remember to stay in your lane and focus on things you can have an impact on through your expertise. Don’t get distracted by the things you can’t control. I’ve learned, although I haven’t always embraced it, that change is slow. I follow politics as a frustrating side hobby, and change doesn’t happen overnight. I keep in mind that you can’t just abandon places. Places are going to exist whether you invest in them or not, so why not invest in them? And I’ve also learned that we can too easily let the noise get in, especially local noise, so I try to not get bogged down by the noise of the news. Like, ‘Oh my gosh, there is so much violence and crime,’ and the 30,000-foot belief is that communities are just that way. But we’re talking about people who have lives there. I remember at another job, someone told me, ‘You’re sending me into this neighborhood, but is it safe for me to go there and do a credit fair?’ I said, ‘You’re probably gonna pass kids waiting for the school bus. It’s going to be 8 a.m. This is where families are raising their kids. Remember that.’”
Nikki Woelfel, Vice President of Community Development, Carrollton Bank

“My partner’s probably used to it now because it’s been almost 12 years doing this work, but I’ll always be looking for addresses. I have an app on my phone. I know how to look up who the owner is. I get the parcel number. And then when I get home, I go into the City's land title system. So it’s just constant. There are 10,000 problems to solve all over. When I drive around, it’s like, ‘I wonder how that property got to be that way? What is the story behind that one?’ They’re often terribly tragic: someone died, there was a fire, somebody was evicted. But in order to take that property and turn it into something positive, you have to understand how it got there in the first place to fix the problems associated with the title and then try to push the place back out to somebody who can do something with it. We’ve got a lot of stories like this because we do like 50 of these cases a year. There’s this physical blight that you see, but then there’s this hidden legal blight. That’s where our team really gets into it. Like, ‘What are all of the other issues that aren’t visible but just as much of a barrier to solving a problem as fixing up the roof or windows or whatever it is?’”Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri — “My partner’s probably used to it now because it’s been almost 12 years doing this work, but I’ll always be looking for addresses. I have an app on my phone. I know how to look up who the owner is. I get the parcel number. And then when I get home, I go into the City's land title system. So it’s just constant. There are 10,000 problems to solve all over. When I drive around, it’s like, ‘I wonder how that property got to be that way? What is the story behind that one?’ They’re often terribly tragic: someone died, there was a fire, somebody was evicted. But in order to take that property and turn it into something positive, you have to understand how it got there in the first place to fix the problems associated with the title and then try to push the place back out to somebody who can do something with it. We’ve got a lot of stories like this because we do like 50 of these cases a year. There’s this physical blight that you see, but then there’s this hidden legal blight. That’s where our team really gets into it. Like, ‘What are all of the other issues that aren’t visible but just as much of a barrier to solving a problem as fixing up the roof or windows or whatever it is?’”
Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri

What did you think you were going to be when you were younger?“A ballerina or a civil rights attorney. Although I do wonder what it would be like to live in New York and travel the world dancing, I think it makes perfect sense to be where I am right now.  Since I was a little girl, I’ve always felt a deep responsibility to my community. And my community’s here — it’s Fairground Park and O’Fallon Park. So I’m just grateful that I get the privilege to be here and pursue my dreams and see them come to life with my neighbors. I think it’s exactly where I need to be. It’s so, so, so hard, even traumatizing, and there are definitely days when it feels like, ‘You need to go somewhere else, Charli.’ But I’m not giving up.”Charli Cooksey, Founder & CEO, WEPOWER — *What did you think you were going to be when you were younger?*
“A ballerina or a civil rights attorney. Although I do wonder what it would be like to live in New York and travel the world dancing, I think it makes perfect sense to be where I am right now. Since I was a little girl, I’ve always felt a deep responsibility to my community. And my community’s here — it’s Fairground Park and O’Fallon Park. So I’m just grateful that I get the privilege to be here and pursue my dreams and see them come to life with my neighbors. I think it’s exactly where I need to be. It’s so, so, so hard, even traumatizing, and there are definitely days when it feels like, ‘You need to go somewhere else, Charli.’ But I’m not giving up.”
Charli Cooksey, Founder & CEO, WEPOWER

“When I was in second grade, I was president of the Busy Bee Club, so I knew I was going to be in charge. I always had to be in charge. I was the president of my youth group too. Then in college, I thought I would be a teacher. At one point, I was an English major. I was of the generation where teaching or nursing was what I was told to do. Social work wasn’t in our framework. My mother came to this country when she was 19. Neither my mother nor my father got beyond eighth grade, but education was really important in my family. So going to college was a big deal. My sister went to art school and worked hard to pay for that. I went to a state school because it was cheap. The year after I graduated with a BSW, my school implemented a one-year MSW combination. I was part of the first class to come back and get an MSW with advanced standing. I wanted to go to law school at that point, but I was also tired of school: ‘Three years of law school versus one year to get an MSW? Ah, I’ll do the MSW.’ Of course, I went the clinical route because that’s what everybody did. And I never used it because I immediately got hired by a Jewish youth group to do program development, leadership training, and nonprofit advising. In the beginning, I did some therapy as volunteer work. But I always felt like I need to fix things. I can’t sit for an hour nodding my head and keeping my mouth shut going ‘um-hum.’ Still, I use clinical work every day and I tell that to my students all the time.”Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor, Office of Field Education, Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis — “When I was in second grade, I was president of the Busy Bee Club, so I knew I was going to be in charge. I always had to be in charge. I was the president of my youth group too. Then in college, I thought I would be a teacher. At one point, I was an English major. I was of the generation where teaching or nursing was what I was told to do. Social work wasn’t in our framework. My mother came to this country when she was 19. Neither my mother nor my father got beyond eighth grade, but education was really important in my family. So going to college was a big deal. My sister went to art school and worked hard to pay for that. I went to a state school because it was cheap. The year after I graduated with a BSW, my school implemented a one-year MSW combination. I was part of the first class to come back and get an MSW with advanced standing. I wanted to go to law school at that point, but I was also tired of school: ‘Three years of law school versus one year to get an MSW? Ah, I’ll do the MSW.’ Of course, I went the clinical route because that’s what everybody did. And I never used it because I immediately got hired by a Jewish youth group to do program development, leadership training, and nonprofit advising. In the beginning, I did some therapy as volunteer work. But I always felt like I need to fix things. I can’t sit for an hour nodding my head and keeping my mouth shut going ‘um-hum.’ Still, I use clinical work every day and I tell that to my students all the time.”
Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor, Office of Field Education, Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis

“The level of participation in the community is strong but it’s also on life support. And I love the word ‘community,’ but I also love the word ‘neighborhood.’ For a long time, in my neighborhood, I never knew a Walnut Park East and a Walnut Park West. We were just Walnut Park, united. And I think about how at some point, we dropped the word ‘neighbor.’ The atmosphere just becomes the ‘hood.’ What a contrast. A name is critical. It has such an impact. My name is Sundy, and something seeps in there to permeate in my cells that causes me to be kind of sunshine-y. Anyway, remember Sesame Street and how they sang, ‘Who are the people in your neighborhood?’ Oh my goodness, it’s true! When I looked out my window to see the landscape, we had Mrs. Sneed across the street and Mrs. Ashley — we had neighborhood and that sense of community. We really knew who the people were in the neighborhood — the person who drove the bus, the person who delivered mail. Now so many residents don’t even want to get to know each other. It’s a different atmosphere. In my neighborhood, we do have a groundswell of community. We have those pockets of neighbors we all love and give a card to or vegetables from our gardens. Still, it used to be stronger.”Sundy Whiteside, Board President of SLACO - St. Louis Association of Community Organizations, Co-Founder of the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative, and Co-Chair of the Vacancy Advisory Committee — “The level of participation in the community is strong but it’s also on life support. And I love the word ‘community,’ but I also love the word ‘neighborhood.’ For a long time, in my neighborhood, I never knew a Walnut Park East and a Walnut Park West. We were just Walnut Park, united. And I think about how at some point, we dropped the word ‘neighbor.’ The atmosphere just becomes the ‘hood.’ What a contrast. A name is critical. It has such an impact. My name is Sundy, and something seeps in there to permeate in my cells that causes me to be kind of sunshine-y. Anyway, remember Sesame Street and how they sang, ‘Who are the people in your neighborhood?’ Oh my goodness, it’s true! When I looked out my window to see the landscape, we had Mrs. Sneed across the street and Mrs. Ashley — we had neighborhood and that sense of community. We really knew who the people were in the neighborhood — the person who drove the bus, the person who delivered mail. Now so many residents don’t even want to get to know each other. It’s a different atmosphere. In my neighborhood, we do have a groundswell of community. We have those pockets of neighbors we all love and give a card to or vegetables from our gardens. Still, it used to be stronger.”
Sundy Whiteside, Board President of SLACO - St. Louis Association of Community Organizations, Co-Founder of the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative, and Co-Chair of the Vacancy Advisory Committee