A Dream Realized
TRACY WILKES’ baby is growing up and preparing to mature under new guidance.
Wilkes, a co-founder of DREAMS OF WILMINGTON INC. and the nonprofit’s only executive director to date, is planning to leave her position at the end of October.
“You’ve got to let your kid go off to college,” she says with a laugh.
Wilkes makes it clear she’s not retiring.
“Stepping down from Dreams has more to do with not having enough flexibility; it’s not so much that I’m ready to retire,” she explains.
Wilkes wants to be able to accompany her husband, Paul, when he travels to India on visits to his Homes of Hope, which builds and funds orphanages and schools for the poorest of the poor.
Having raised Dreams from infancy to a stable, growing force for change in Wilmington’s downtown neighborhoods, Wilkes would now like to consult with fledgling arts education organizations. She’s open to the idea of helping replicate Dreams in other North Carolina communities. And she hopes still to be of use to Dreams in some capacity.
“Dreams has never been in better shape organizationally and programmatically. What better time to pass the baton?” she says. “This is an excellent time in the life of an organization. Often founders make a terrible mistake and stay too long. Organizations need new ideas, new blood, innovation.”
When she moved to Wilmington in the 1990s, Wilkes saw a need: no organization was offering free arts classes for children. As someone with a background in both theater and clinical social work, Wilkes viewed access to arts education as a social justice issue. She gathered a group of like-minded people, who ultimately formed Dreams of Wilmington to offer free instruction to young people in need.
The organization’s first home was three rooms in a building on Market Street owned by the Junior League. After nine months, thanks to the intervention of then-Dreams board member Loraine Raynor, Dreams moved into the building vacated by Union Missionary Baptist Church when the congregation built a new church building.
“We rented that space, at the corner of Sixth and Ann streets, for fourteen years and were very thankful,” Wilkes says. “The church was very generous; they didn’t charge us very much rent.”
From the beginning, the program targeted the “most marginalized kids and the poorest kids,” Wilkes says. Dreams – the organization – prospered as its young participants dared to articulate and pursue their own dreams and talents.
Meanwhile, Wilkes had a vision for the kind of facility her fledgling organization really needed.
“I kept agitating the city, saying ‘There must be an abandoned building somewhere that we can have,’” Wilkes recalls.
After a couple of possibilities fell through, Wilkes found the city’s former bus maintenance garage in the Northside and asked to lease half of the building’s 12,000 square feet. The city insisted Dreams lease the entire building, which needed major renovation work.
Wilkes and her board raised $850,000, which included a Community Development Block Grant through the city, to rehab 8,000 square feet of the space for classrooms and offices. For the past three years, that renovated facility has echoed with the sounds of poetry readings, play rehearsals, music making, and lively discussions. Artwork lines the hallways.
Today, Dreams provides programming for about 800 young people at the old garage, and another fundraising initiative is underway to renovate the remaining 4,000 square feet into a large open space to be used for performances and community events. Wilkes is hopeful that the project will be complete by September 2016.
“Like any good executive director, I spend a lot of time with the finances to make sure we’re in good fiscal shape,” she says. “I also spend time developing
marketing strategies aimed at getting the support of benefactors. We never have to market to the kids.”
Wilkes says she has also been heavily involved in the “big picture” aspects of the organization: programmatic philosophy as well as learning and implementing best practices in areas such as youth development, arts education, and nonprofit management.
“It has always been very important to us to turn out a quality product. Many of the children we work with have received second-class everything,” she says. “Part of wanting a wonderful space is inculcating in them that they deserve ‘good,’ and that it is theirs. That’s a pretty tall order, and takes a lot of hard thinking.”
After seventeen years of hard thinking, Wilkes says she’s ready to step down from what she terms “a position of incredible responsibility.”
“I’m going to take a really deep breath for a couple of months,” she says. “If you are open and paying attention, opportunities present themselves in ways you could never imagine. I’m very zen about the whole thing.
“But,” she says, with a twinkle in her eye, “There’s not a whole lot of grass going to grow under this girl’s feet.”
Celebrate! Roast and Toast to honor Tracy Wilkes: Dreams Presents! annual fundraiser September 27-Hilton Wilmington Riverside, Info: dreamswilmington.org
To view more of photographer Katherine Clark's work, go to www.katherineclarkphotography.com.
