Umstead Park Church of Christ

Full Circles Foundation is a community based endeavor! Our work would not be possible if it wasn't for the contributions from Raleigh folks and beyond. A great supporter of Full Circles Foundation is the is the host for our Strong Home Camp; Umstead Park United Church of Christ. The church is an open space for people to worship,  "no matter their gender, race, or sexual identity." 

When Full Circles Foundation was searching for space for our Strong Home Camp, we were running short of ideas and resources. It was beginning to feel like Strong Home Camp may not happen, but our connection with Umstead Park United Church of Christ pulled through. The pastor of Umstead, Doug Long, met with us back in May to discuss using the space. 

"Your ideas almost perfectly align with ours," he said, "The original intention of the church was to have it as an open space for all kinds of community groups to use."

Churches and spaces for faith and spirituality are mostly used for only one to two days during the week, making them perfect spaces for community organizing to take place. Umstead is a leader in empowering social entrepreneurship by offering their space for operation. 

Originally, Umstead held church services out of a YMCA in downtown Raleigh. It has since made partnership with an architecture group for their current space, where both church and business go on in the same building. The fusion of faith and architecture have come together beautifully, creating the only LEED Gold Certified church in the southeast United States. In addition, Umstead is located a short walk from Umstead State Park, which has also been an exciting resource for Full Circles Foundation. The Umstead Park Rangers are leading the Strong Campers on a nature walk and canoeing this week. 

The blessing of Umstead Church and The Umstead State Park has made our dreams of girl empowerment more of a reality. Their generosity and innovative outlook on being a community makes them a perfect partner for Full Circles Foundation.

Kicking Off Camp and Raising Resources!

by Geri Hubbe


The first day of Strong Home Camp is here!  Everyone on the Full Circles Foundation team has been eagerly anticipating this truly groundbreaking and memorable Monday morning, when for the first time our campers and staff will be together as a group.  Early on Monday, many of us will be up before dawn preparing to navigate the complicated Raleigh CAT bus system with our young campers, destined for the Umstead Park United Church of Christ, from locations all over the city.  We have been hard at work for the past several months, planning for two eventful and transformative weeks of exploration and discovery, hiking and canoeing, creativity and play, gardening and gratitude for our natural surroundings.


Our fundraiser on Friday, Local Brews Local Swag, was a blast. Our alterative silent auction generated great interest with items like bike tune ups from All Star Bikes, a locally made organic body care basket from Nature’s Pure Essentials, original artwork by Alex Beresnyak, piercing gift certificates from Femme Fatale, and much more! While sporting outlandish Mod and Rocker outfits, we also heard live poetry and music from four local musicians, tasted three delicious local brews from Carolina Brewing Company, Natty Green's, and Big Boss, and when all was said and done… drumroll… we raised well over $800!


Please stay tuned for our up coming silent auctions and fundraisers. There are plenty more awesome concerts, bake-sales, yard-sales, and silent auctions on the way!

Big Thanks to FCF Community Members!

Our first summer of Strong Camps would not be possible without the help and generosity from some outstanding Raleigh community members.  So many individuals and small businesses have donated time and resources that will hopefully make our camps fun, energizing, and instructive.  Two very special community members include Lea J. Alston and Jenn Hales.

Lea J. Alston is the owner of Scentsuosity, a small, local business that sells a variety of handmade natural body care products.  Alston makes all the products herself and only uses the best of natural ingredients such as essential oils, mineral salts, and herbs.  Because Full Circles focuses on the importance of green living, entrepreneurship, and health, we thought she would be the perfect person to organize with and showoff her expertise to our campers.  She warmly offered to volunteer her time during all three of the Strong Camps.  We are now planning workshops that will highlight the environmentally friendly aspects of her products and help campers realize they too can make green products.  During the Strong Self Camp, topics of hygiene and health will be emphasized and campers will hopefully get the opportunity to make their own natural lip glosses.   Finally, during the Strong Neighbor camp, Alston will talk about her own experience as an entrepreneur and give the girls insight for the future. We are very much looking forward to spending time with this wonderful community member that is sure to be a favorite with the campers!

For more information about Lea J. Alston and her products you may contact her at 919-229-9139 or at scentsuosity@gmail.com. Her store is located at 300 Blake St. Raleigh, NC 27601– Downtown in City Market.  Her website, which is great for looking at all of her products, is www.scentsuosity.com.

Another one of our awesome community members who has offered to donate their time is Jenn Hales.  She too is a small, local business owner and her fine arts studio, Patina, is also located in downtown Raleigh.  We hope to utilize her creativity and artistic skills during the Strong Home Camp by making flower bombs, also known as seed bombs.  These little bundles of seeds can be made easily with just a few basic ingredients and we hope that this will be a fun interactive project for the campers.  They will learn about how to help grow more plants in their communities and also how to make and sell their own products.  The seed bombs/flower bombs can be thrown in abandon or bare lots in order to produce green space since the seeds in the bombs are hearty and thrive in barren environments.  We hope to sell them online and around the community.  Jenn has also given us great ideas about how to make our own paper and other ways of artistic expression.   She is just what we were looking for to enrich our campers’ experiences and help them find their own artistic expressions while being green in the process.

For more information about Jenn Hales and her studio you may contact her at 919-656-8713 or at PatinabyJennHales@gmail.com.   Her website is www.JennHales.com and she can also be found at the Downtown City Market. 

We are very happy and excited that we can have so many wonderful community members and hope that our community will keep growing! 

Full Circles Beginnings

by Mary Owen


Full Circles Foundation's pilot program is underway!  I am just one of many new entrepreneurial team members for the Strong Camp summer program.  My name is Mary Owen and I was born and raised here in Raleigh, North Carolina.  I am a recent graduate of Appalachian State University and I am very excited to be a part of this new venture.  My greatest fear coming out of college was that I would not find a job I could be passionate, about but I am in love with this organization! This past week was Full Circles' instructor training week, which was profoundly successful and I thoroughly enjoyed being involved.  People of all walks of life came together to share their experiences and knowledge and to learn and grow together. We talked about a lot of exciting new ideas and how we could turn those ideas into a reality.  Some of my favorite snapshots were our discussions about asset-based thinking and anti-oppression, which helped us to understand each other better as individuals so that we could develop as a group.

Asset-based community development is a transformational way of thinking that sees abundance all around us. Rather than feeling discouraged by the things we lack, like large amounts of monetary resources, we can be creative and compile all of our diverse skills, networks, time, and materials to meet our needs. This way of thinking has proved to be extremely useful to Full Circles Foundation, but it has also been extremely helpful for me on an individual level because it helps me to focus on the positive and let the negative go.

During training week, asset-based thinking tied in well with the anti-oppression workshop because conversations about oppression, for obvious reasons, tend to focus on the negative.  Oppression is something that most folks experience in some way or another and privilege is also something each of us carry to varying degrees; but by sharing our identities and experiences, our hopes and our fears, and actively listening to each other, we were able to honor the differences in our identities and experiences and understand them to be uniquely valuable to our common mission.

I was also excited to learn about social entrepreneurship.  Social entrepreneurship is a way of making change that focuses on finding ‘potential’ (anything that has value) and using it to create more ‘potential’ in a way that exponentially helps the world. Our group talked about social entrepreneurship as a biomimetic concept, which means it is a model based on natural systems. Natural systems tend to employ feedback loops (autopoietic structures), which are named as such because information or energy is fed back into the system rather than being pointed linearly.  Linear models waste hard-gained information, resources, and energy because output is not utilized or reincorporated into the model sufficiently.  An example of a feedback loop is the stomach. When we get hungry our stomachs tell our brains that we are hungry so we eat.  When we have had enough our stomachs tell our brains that we are full so we stop eating.  If there were no interaction between brains and stomachs we would either eat forever until we popped or we would never eat and eventually starve.

Social entrepreneurship is like a stomach because it relies on the transformation and interaction of resources and information. It is a model that engages many forms of ‘potential’ and produces many forms of ‘potential’ too.  In our case, our intention is that by putting our energy into the futures of young women they will in turn contribute to the well being of their communities by being empowered in various ways.  My intention is that we can in some way convey the message that money is not the worthiest goal but rather it is just one of many resources that can be used towards a greater goal.

This week we are all working very diligently to get ready for our first camp, the Strong Home camp, which starts next week. We are calling families, organizing fundraisers, improving our curriculum, and meeting with contributors about cool opportunities for our girls and young women.  The group already feels a lot like family and I am having a blast! I feel intensely connected to the work that we are doing and I hope that our collective energy and ideas will be able to reach some of you out there and inspire you to start something in your own communities.