wfn.org | Dallas woman makes war on poverty a personal mission

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

Sept. 10, 2002	News media contact: Tim Tanton7(615)742-54707Nashville,
Tenn.  10-31-71BP{403}

NOTE: Will McCal's name is spelled correctly. Photographs are available with
this report.

By Paul McKay*

DALLAS (UMNS) - One day about 20 years ago, Kathy Dudley ventured out of the
secure confines of her four-bedroom, three-bath home in the suburbs and
drove into one of the inner city's most impoverished areas.

With a soccer ball in one hand and a Bible in the other, Dudley - a
diminutive white woman with a smile as bright as a dollar - attracted hard
stares and no small amount of suspicion in the African-American neighborhood
as she worked the streets, recruiting kids for a soccer team.

"I had looked around and wondered how to build a bridge to that
neighborhood, and I decided to do it with a soccer ball and a Bible," Dudley
says. "I chose soccer because I had to figure out what kids ages 5 to 12
could play without the big ones hurting the little ones. So I bought a
soccer ball. 

"I also bought a book on how to play soccer, since I didn't know how."

The rest is Dallas history.

Dudley, a United Methodist, is founder and chairwoman of the board of the
Dallas Leadership Foundation, a Christian, nonprofit network that connects
businesses, churches, neighborhood associations and volunteers in restoring
the Texas city's poorest neighborhoods.

But then again - as Dudley is quick to point out - the idea behind the
foundation is to help the residents of blighted neighborhoods help
themselves.

"To do the right thing, you have to do it the right way," says Dudley, 47.
"In community development, you can't go into neighborhoods and go by what
you perceive the needs to be. We go in and listen. They tell us what the
needs are."

Dallas Leadership Foundation donors, who give time, labor and money, include
construction companies, real estate professionals and lending institutions,
as well as churches, pastors and individuals from all walks of life. Yet the
"captains" in rehabilitation projects are the neighborhood leaders who live
in the communities.

The foundation also sponsors special ministries, such as a "Christmas" store
and the Church Prison Collaborative, which focuses on helping offenders from
the time they are released. 

Poor beginnings

The success of the foundation and other Dallas ministries started by Dudley
is a testament to the faith of the peppy Dudley, who knows how poverty
feels.

"I grew up in southwest Appalachia in a placed called Barren Springs, in
southwest Virginia," Dudley says. "My father was a sharecropper. I was the
12th of 12 children. The first three of them died, and they died of poverty.

"Barren Springs was pretty barren. The black community lived on one side of
the spring and the whites on the other, but we all drank from the same
spring."

Dudley says she was 17 when she accepted Jesus Christ as her personal savior
in a Baptist Church. "I was a Baptist about two weeks before the Methodists
saved me from the Baptists," she says with a laugh. "I've been a Methodist
ever since."

Thanks to aid from a federal program called "Upward Bound," Dudley attended
the United Methodist-related Ferrum College in Virginia, which honored her
with a Distinguished Alumnus Award two years ago. At college, she met her
husband of 29 years, Sayres Dudley.

"Sayres' dad was a judge in Virginia's horse country, a very wealthy part of
the country, and he married this poor girl from farm country, a
sharecropper's daughter. He was in his second year of school, and we both
were radically vocal about our faith."

After joining the U.S. Air Force, Sayres Dudley was stationed in
Massachusetts, where he and his bride applied their radically vocal faith to
radical action.

"We started bringing in bums and prostitutes to live with us," Kathy Dudley
recalls. "At first, we'd bring in one or two at a time. Of course, the Air
Force thought we were crazy. We also had cross-denominational Bible studies,
so we were sort of doing dual ministry by having people live with us. We've
always tried to be obedient to Isaiah 58."

Isaiah 58 includes the call to "divide your bread with the hungry and bring
in the homeless poor into the house" - a call that the Dudleys continued to
take seriously after the five-year military stint.

Feeling they were being led by God to move to Dallas - a city that offered
wide-open opportunity - the Dudleys seized on opportunities that enabled
Sayres to succeed quickly as a top producer with a job-placement business.
He was so successful that the Dudleys moved into the four-bedroom,
three-bathroom house in Grand Prairie, a Dallas suburb, which they shared
with the homeless poor.

"I was living in this wealthy neighborhood in a house with three bathrooms,
and I'd grown up without running water," Dudley says. "We brought these
strange people over to live with us all the time, and we thought well, our
neighbors must hate us, but we love our neighbors.

"They did hate us. One Christmas we took yule logs to the neighbors. Nobody
wanted them."

During this time, in the early '80s, Sayres Dudley started his own
job-placement business. Meanwhile, Kathy Dudley ventured into the inner
city, where she started Voice of Hope Ministries, the forerunner of the
Dallas Leadership Foundation. Voice of Hope was honored by the first Bush
administration with a "Thousand Points of Light Award."

The Dudleys eventually sold their upscale home in suburban Dallas and moved
into a poor black neighborhood, an area where most residents wanted to move
out.

"The first week we lived there, a man was shot and killed in our front
yard," Dudley casually recalls. 

Undeterred by the obstacles in building up trust with their new neighbors,
the Dudleys enrolled their two sons in the neighborhood public school. They
established a community center and a resale store, and built a multifaceted
ministry that thrived for 13 years until Kathy Dudley turned her Voice of
Hope Ministries over to African-American leaders.

Dudley then established the Dallas Leadership Foundation in 1995. The idea
of the change was to empower the poor neighborhoods and their residents to
become self-sufficient. "That was the idea from the start of Voice of Hope
Ministries, to hand it over to the African-American leadership for them to
maintain," Dudley notes.

'Abiding in the vine'

The foundation today is overseen by an African-American president, Will
McCal, though Dudley remains involved as chairwoman of the board.

Dudley and McCal, 38, have been an effective team, capitalizing on their
similarities despite some differences. Dudley grew up white but poor, while
McCal - a Baptist who was raised the son of a Baptist preacher in Los
Angeles - grew up middle class.

"I experienced poverty, but Will, even though he was middle class,
experienced racism," Dudley says.

McCal, who abandoned successful careers in commercial real estate and
insurance to lead the foundation, says Dudley's theology was one of the
things that impressed him most about her when he interviewed for the
position. "She's a theologian, but the activist in her won't admit it," he
says.

Dudley's theology is grounded in Isaiah 58, Ezra and Ruth, Haggai and
portions of Chronicles I. And of course it draws on Nehemiah, the community
builder, and the gospel of John and Ephesians 4.

"You can't have a vine with one little branch," Dudley says of the
foundation's network. 
"You've got to have a body, and I've learned the importance and value of
having that body. It's all about abiding in the vine. It's Jesus flowing
through that makes the change."

While the Dudleys and McCal emphasize their philosophy of enabling residents
to build up their own lives and residential neighborhoods, many speak of the
impact that Kathy Dudley has had on their individual lives.

"I was 13 when Kathy came into west Dallas," says Tonya Giraud, a young
Dallas woman who manages 401(k) plans for a major investment firm. "I was
from a broken home. My siblings were going off in different directions, and
my friends were going down the wrong paths with drugs and all. Kathy was a
detour in my life - a good detour. She showed me another side of life and
gave me hope, and of course she showed me the way of faith.

"I was 13 and felt the world was on my shoulders. I was also abused, the
most horrible abuse you can imagine, and she helped me through that mainly
by just listening to me. She even taught me how to forgive my abusers.

"It took some courage for her to move into that neighborhood, but she always
knew God was with her," Giraud says. "When you have that going for you,
everything will be all right."

# # #

*McKay is a free-lance writer living in Dallas.

*************************************
United Methodist News Service
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