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Photos by Jared Lazarus
This profile is part of an ongoing series featuring local community leaders.
Around the world to Durham
Jeannine Privat, president of the Burch Avenue Neighborhood Association, gets emotional when she talks about her neighborhood. And she has a lot to compare it to. She grew up outside of a small town in Louisiana — “in the swamp” she says — and, in her teens, she told a friend she wanted to live all over the world to decide where she should be. And she did – including Los Angeles, Liberia, Australia, Atlanta, Connecticut and more. She also moved back to Louisiana for a while after getting her law degree.
Then, when her husband chose Duke for his fellowship, they moved into the Tuscaloosa-Lakewood neighborhood where they lived for five years. A two-year stint up north followed before they were able to return to the area and settle in the Burch Avenue neighborhood. Privat appreciates the Triangle area is “big enough to have the amenities of a large city, but with a small-town feel.”
“I don’t want to be in national politics, and I have limited ability over what happens at the state level, but I can build community locally,”says Jeannine Privat, president of the Burch Avenue Neighborhood Association.
Leaning into community-building
Privat makes a point of leaning into community-building on a daily basis. When she’s having a bad day, she still tries to stop for small talk with a neighbor rather than do the “wave and move on.” When I arrange a zoom, she counters with coffee in person.
She recognizes, “I don’t want to be in national politics, and I have limited ability over what happens at the state level, but I can build community locally.”
Growing up in a rural area, she was used to people helping each other out. ”People think community just naturally happens, but it doesn’t. It takes effort so I try to do these little things to try to help build community and counter disconnection and polarization.”
She thinks it is important to hear different voices and create space for them. And when she helps do this, she doesn’t take it for granted when people show up whether that’s at the annual neighborhood meeting, the block party, or a zoning board meeting.
“I saw the lake didn’t clean itself.”
It is fair to say Burch Avenue neighbors are, at least in part, showing up because of Privat’s efforts. She says she learned to do community involvement by example. She remembers being “dragged along” to community meetings her parents attended. Her father was arrested at an environmental protest. Her mother led a decade-long cleanup of a local lake that had been used as a dump. She explains,”I saw the lake didn’t clean itself.”
I saw that no one person could do it themselves, but one person can get things going. And, that a lot of people are willing to help if they are invited to join in.
– Jeannine Privat, president, Burch Avenue Neighborhood Association
Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership helps community leaders connect
These days, Privat brings her own kids, ages six and eight, along to the community meetings she attends, including most of the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership (DDNP) leadership meetings. The DDNP focuses on a network of 14 partner neighborhoods, gathering and collaborating regularly with neighborhood association leaders based on their collective interests and issues.
“It’s helpful to hear from other neighborhood leaders about what their communities are facing,” says Privat. “We find most priorities are aligned across the neighborhoods. When our community wants to do a project, we benefit from not only from financial support from Duke, but also by learning from the neighborhoods what issues and roadblocks they faced when doing similar projects – such as to put up a neighborhood sign.”
One of the projects the Duke Doing Good Neighborhood fund helped make possible is the Burch Avenue Neighborhood oral history project. As Privat explains,”Both communal stories and individual stories are incredibly important. Taking time to sharing stories when we meet one-on-one helps us get to know each other and creates personal relationships. Communal stories and spaces provide ties that bring us together as a larger community.”
Exchanging personal stories fosters connections, and connections create a neighborhood. Otherwise, you are just people living next door to each other.
– Jeannine Privat, president, Burch Avenue Neighborhood Association
A tradition of community
Jeannine brings her kids, Jean-Louis, 8, and Eulalie, 6, along to the community meetings she attends, including most of the Duke Durham Neighborhood Partnership (DDNP) leadership meetings.
Privat’s community building is generous. She appreciates her Burch neighborhood, her children’s international school community, and the Duke employees in our area, as she was one for a time. She acknowledges community building takes deliberate effort. It takes showing up by residents as well as institutions like Duke.
The Burch Avenue area is interesting because “There are longtime homeowners who have lived in multiple homes in our neighborhood over the years. They won’t go anywhere else. At the same time, because we also have rental properties, I meet so many people who tell me they lived in Burch at some point.”
It is obvious that while the neighborhood is small, it ties so many people together. Just like Jeannine Privat.