When Stephanie Lightfoot first arrived in a Kingston, Jamaica neighborhood as a Peace Corps volunteer, 400 families were squatting on land after losing their homes to a hurricane. The government wanted them gone. But Lightfoot had other ideas.
“I negotiated a deal with the government to allow them to stay,” Lightfoot recalls. “We collected money from all of them every month and they slowly purchased their land. So it’s, you know, 20 years later, but they own that land now.”
It’s a story that captures the essence of who Lightfoot is—a community builder who sees possibility where others see problems. Today, that same spirit drives her work as a board member for Columbia Community Care (CCC), where she’s been supporting Executive Director Erika Strauss Chavarria since the organization’s inception.
A Life Built on Community Service
After her Peace Corps service, where she helped Jamaican families build brick houses and created an arts-based community center that still operates today, Lightfoot became a community organizer in Baltimore City and Washington, D.C.
“I used music to bring everybody together,” she explains. “The community center was about expression through the arts. People would talk about life through counseling and then express it through some sort of artistic expression.”
Her nonprofit work eventually led her to start the Orioles Academy in West Baltimore, a program that took 50 students facing expulsion and gave them a second chance. Later, she pivoted to a new career path that would eventually lead her to own the Face Place Day Spa, which she’s run for 14 years with an intentional focus on community wellness.
Lightfoot is also a licensed real estate agent with Keller Williams Lucidio Agency, where she assists people in their journey to home ownership–which she sees as a pathway to generational wealth, community strength, and community involvement. To promote access to home ownership, Lightfoot will be working on a program to offer education on home purchasing and down payment assistance to families.
Supporting CCC from Day One
When COVID hit and Erika Chavarria, CCC’s executive director, posted on Facebook about feeding students, Lightfoot was right there.
“The day COVID hit we talking and Erika said, ‘I’m going to post about gathering food,’ and I knew right away I wanted to be part of it.'”
“There’s no end to this,” she says of food insecurity. And, having watched CCC grow from the beginning, she believes in the organization’s ability to make a powerful impact, especially with current economic and political challenges to food safety net programs. “We’ve positioned ourselves to be ready, and now is the moment when it’s seriously needed.”
A Family Affair
Lightfoot’s daughter, Nya, a former standout club volleyball player, leads a volleyball training program for girls that has become a powerful example of how addressing basic needs creates opportunities for growth.
“It was $3,000 just to put them in club volleyball,” Lightfoot recalls. “When you look at volleyball and you look at the schools, you’re going to see Reservoir, River Hill, Mount Hebron—they’re killing it. You’re going to see Oakland Mills, Long Reach—they never touched the ball in their lives. It’s a huge disparity and it’s because some families can afford extracurricular programs, and others can’t.”
Nya recognized this inequity and wanted to change it. “She would say, ‘I want to start a program where anybody could play volleyball,'” Lightfoot recalls. With help from CCC, that vision became a reality.
Looking Ahead
Lightfoot emphasizes that CCC welcomes families before they reach crisis point. By providing groceries, CCC is allowing parents space to provide other opportunities for their children, such as sports or after school programs.
For Lightfoot, it all comes back to what she learned decades ago in Jamaica: communities can take care of each other. “As a community, we can take care of each other. Everyone can share what they have,” she reflects. “This is how a community starts to pull together to lift each other.”
It’s a philosophy she’s lived by for more than 30 years, and one she’s honored to continue through her work with Columbia Community Care.
