The Lexington Center

Incorporated in 1994, Nollie Jenkins Family Center’s (NJFC) initial design intentionally sought to create an inclusive setting that would provide safe, affordable and quality childcare for children from birth until five, and afterschool and summer programming for middle and high school students. The Center operated solely as a childcare facility in the city of Lexington for three years. 

In the fall of 1997, NJFC relocated to Treadwell Grove, a rural community outside the city of Lexington. At this time, the Center’s mission shifted to providing a broader range of services for youth. The following spring the Center, recognizing the power of individual transformation and collective movement-building, expanded it's community organizing and child advocacy. 

Nollie Jenkins Family Center, Inc., received its 501c(3) status on July 31, 2007. It remains a grassroots leadership development, education, and training organization, and is now located in Durant (Holmes County), MS. 

More so now than ever, NJFC is actively engaged in the life and death struggle for the moral center of our nation and local communities. Poverty remains an intended consequence of conscious policies, education is still a gatekeeper, and racism is woven into the entire fabric of our culture and compounds every problem. Low-wealth rural communities of color are struggling to become architects rather than objects of policy in order to cast off these contrived burdens and open the gates to all children regardless of race, class, national origin, language, status, culture or sexual orientation. To achieve these goals it is not enough to be righteous; we must be organized with the capacity to impact the formation and implementation of policy in the public and private sectors.

In the Delta and central regions of Mississippi where Nollie Jenkins Family Center, Inc. toils, the politics of race and class sustains a bitter divide that frames most political, economic and social issues. In the past 3 years we have witnessed knock-down, drag-out state legislative wars over racially-motivated redistricting policies, anti-immigrant policies, massive cuts in public education funding, the advent of charter schools, and efforts to divert public funds to privatize public education. These struggles continue!