Every Wednesday afternoon at 4:30 the sound of children laughing at Michael Newell’s jokes, singing along to SZA, and sharing what they want to be when they grow up resounds throughout Dame’s Chicken and Waffles in Chapel Hill.

As one of this year’s after-school activities, the children of the Communiversity Youth Program (CYP) spend these afternoons learning culinary, customer service, and management skills under the guidance of Newell, co-owner of Dame’s Chicken and Waffles and an alumnus of UNC-Chapel Hill.

Dame’s is a casual eatery popular with students that serves comfort food, including “almost-world-famous” chicken-and-waffle combinations and “shmears” of flavored butters. The local chain currently has three other locations, in Greensboro, Cary, and Durham. The Chapel Hill location opened in 2019. 

“I thought that this partnership was a really neat idea, and I was really excited about it. Of course we’re happy to work with the kids,” Newell says one afternoon after serving the CYP scholars their weekly fix of chicken fingers, french fries, and burgers. “Especially when you can have a partnership where you can do something that’s impacting other lives while still doing what we do, which is serve people good food.”

CYP is a community outreach initiative helping K-12 students from low-income families and underrepresented communities in Orange County schools learn interpersonal and literacy skills. It has been sponsored by the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History since 1993.

In 2022, 11.4 percent of children from Orange County were living below the poverty level, according to data from the Kids Count Data Center.

“[Participating] kids’ families have historically and economically been below the poverty level. That’s been the case 90 to 95 percent of the time,” says LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, CYP supervisor and director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center. “Part of the work put into Communiversity is to get young people exposed to various hands-on experiences.”

Johnavae Campbell, a senior manager and child welfare and education expert at strategic consulting company ICF, has been involved with CYP for three years. She sought out CYP in 2020 for her eldest, seventh-grade daughter, Charlyse (Charly) Campbell, who “needed more than what she was getting at just a basic school setting.”

“[Charly] needed a communal space where she could kind of explore and be uplifted and explore her gifts and talents in a way that may not have been fostered or, at the time, appreciated,” Campbell says. 

Campbell describes partnerships like CYP’s with Dame’s as “absolutely critical,” adding that CYP “has more empowerment than it does some kind of deficit narrative” when it comes to creating programs for underrepresented children. Other organizations CYP has collaborated with include Ten Mothers Farm, a small farm located in Cedar Grove, and an NC State program called The Engineering Place, among others. 

“Dame’s allows [the children] to understand aspects of business and hospitality,” Campbell says. 

Fourth-grade student Quinn Campbell, Johnavae Campbell’s second child, says that she and her sister Charly “love the food part” at the restaurant, alongside the opportunity to see the volunteers and their friends. 

During the first few weeks at Dame’s, Quinn learned how to navigate the “complicated buttons” on the cash register, use the waffle maker and scoop mac and cheese into containers.

She also met a manager for the very first time.

“At first I was scared of meeting the manager because of the mean things you hear on TikTok,” Quinn says. “But they aren’t, like, Karens. He wasn’t mean at all.”

Most CYP activities take place at the United Methodist Church on Franklin Street. Going to an outside location and seeing “someone who looks like the students succeed in business is a beautiful thing,” Manigault-Bryant says. 

“That exposure element becomes really important,” she says. “It gives the kids another way of thinking about access to opportunities that they would not, or might not, necessarily have on a daily basis.”

CYP’s after-school programs are led and organized by UNC undergraduate students volunteering from the Bonner Leadership Program, which is made up of student scholars who are passionate about community service.

“I’ve always wanted to do something with kids,” says Timothy Little, a UNC sophomore and program volunteer. “I thought working like this would be a perfect opportunity to not only volunteer but inspire other kids to go out into the community and help others be the best that they can be.”

Little found out about CYP through Sierra Flynn-Nesbeth, another UNC sophomore volunteer. The Dame’s partnership was the brainchild of Flynn-Nesbeth and her high school English teacher in Cary during the summer of 2023.

“My high school teacher is Michael’s sister, and I really like Dame’s,” Flynn-Nesbeth says. “During the summer, I thought about what we could do this year to make it a little more different and more connected to the community around us.”

Flynn-Nesbeth contacted Newell and they got to work organizing workshops and other plans for the students. To Flynn-Nesbeth, an across-the-street partnership at Dame’s just made sense: Her high school was across the street from the Dame’s location in Cary, she says, and she and her friends would eat there often after school. Now she and the other CYP volunteers take the students across the street from the church to Dame’s in Chapel Hill.

The partnership runs through April but Manigault-Bryant says that she hopes it will continue further. Either way, Newell says he will always be grateful for the opportunity, as a businees owner, to work with CYP.

“To have these moments with the students is one of the more rewarding parts of being a business owner. It’s not always like that every day,” Newell says. “Sometimes people are mad about this or that, or just the doldrums of owning a business can be kind of overwhelming. So it’s nice to always work with young people and kids, to see them grow, learn, and be engaged.” 

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