WHAT IS METANOIA?

Metanoia is a Community Development Corporation (CDC) located in the heart of the Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood in North Charleston, South Carolina. Although we began primarily serving in our Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood, recently we have expanded our efforts to include all of southern North Charleston. We received our 501c3 non-profit designation in 2004.

At Metanoia we focus on finding strengths, or assets, in neighborhoods and using them as building blocks for the eventual success of some of our region’s most distressed communities. These could be in the form of people (human assets) or places/organizations/things (physical assets).

Metanoia is discovering and growing assets to create sustainable change in our neighborhoods by listening to the residents that actually live in our communities. They are the real experts on our neighborhoods. They are the ones with firsthand neighborhood knowledge, identifying areas of opportunity that are in need of targeted investment. Over the years, neighborhood residents have always directed our work and guided the expanding scope of our initiatives.

Metanoia was begun in 2001 by urban ministers Bill Stanfield and Evelyn Oliviera as part of an anti-poverty outreach effort by the
Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of South Carolina. They spent the first year in the community not by developing programs but by simply listening to community members. In doing so, they found one of the neighborhood residents’ chief concerns was having a safe place for their children to go after school. This led to Metanoia’s first initiative: the Young Leaders, a leadership-based afterschool program for elementary school students.

We invite you to join our holistic community development movement as we work to make our community better for generations to come.