When it comes to solving our city’s affordable housing crisis, collaboration is key. Our team was honored to attend the first ever screening of our newest short film “Our Home: Uniting Charlotte for Affordable Housing” at yesterday’s CJC Local News Impact Summit. Thank you Freedom Communities and Crosland Southeast for your advocacy for and dedication to serving those in need of stable housing, and thank you Charlotte Journalism Collaborative and WFAE for creating a space where local stories such as these can be elevated. (fb)

Dharma grew up the only daughter of an Indian family living in a small, rural village in Uttar Pradesh. Early on in her youth, her older brothers encouraged her to study, saying that if she didn’t, they would arrange her marriage. So, she studied to become a nurse. The idea of anyone — especially a young woman — going to nursing school was unheard of in her village, so Dharma had to seek special approval from the village elders, who held traditional views of women’s roles. “Good girls learn how to cook, and that’s the most important task at your in-laws’,” Dharma says. Dharma does know how to cook — but she’s also a nursing school graduate. Through support from Helping India Together, a nonprofit serving marginalized communities in North India, Dharma was placed at a hospital in a rural village in Uttar Pradesh, where she serves a community less than an hour’s drive from where she grew up. There, she works with other nurses and doctors — many of them young women — where she not only saves the lives of local residents, but also inspires the young girls in her community by challenging traditional expectations for young North Indian women. “We can’t keep things as it was in the old days,” Dharma says. “Our society needs to change.” (fb)