Purpose Prize

Marc Freedman Portrait

The Latest from CoGenerate

New Survey Reveals Benefits of Older-Younger Tutoring Teams

New Survey Reveals Benefits of Older-Younger Tutoring Teams

For the past year, Ampact, with support from CoGenerate’s Generations Serving Together program, placed cogenerational pairs of AmeriCorps members in elementary schools. The older and younger adults worked side by side to improve students’ reading and math skills. A...

The Billionaire Who Gave Away His Fortune Took a Big Chance on Us

The Billionaire Who Gave Away His Fortune Took a Big Chance on Us

We at CoGenerate (formerly Encore.org) are mourning the loss of Chuck Feeney this week. Without Chuck's vision and generosity we likely would not exist as an organization. Twenty-five years ago Atlantic Philanthropies took a chance on our start-up, playing a...

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Ammie Jenkins

Sandhills Family Heritage Association
Purpose Prize Fellow 2006

Building sustainable communities through family land ownership, economic self-sufficiency, and cultural heritage preservation

Ammie McRae Jenkins, 65, sees land as the center of family and community life in the rural South – a source of income, food, medicine, culture, history, and self sufficiency. When she was a child, her family lost their land and means of family support that was connected to the land. In 2001, Jenkins founded the Sandhills Family Heritage Association to stem the loss of African-American family land and preserve the natural and cultural heritage of African Americans whose family roots are in the Sandhills of North Carolina. Jenkins developed heritage tours to educate and celebrate the achievements of African Americans and conducted oral history interviews to document the lives of local individuals and families. The Sandhills Family Heritage Association is now working with national and regional organizations to establish a national Black land trust to help African Americans retain and regain lands that were lost by theft, intimidation or discrimination.