Habitat hires new executive director
By Nick Hiltunen
Published in News on October 30, 2009 1:46 PM
Tieshia Moore
Tieshia Moore is no stranger to service to the impoverished.
Mrs. Moore, recently named the executive director of Habitat for Humanity Goldsboro-Wayne, spent much of her childhood doing missionary work with her mother, Bonnie Daniels.
"I grew up in the United States, largely," said Mrs. Moore, who also teaches an online-only course for N.C. State, in its newly minted minor, Interdisciplinary Leadership.
But although much of her childhood was in the U.S., her life was dotted with missionary trips to places like the Dominican Republic and Bolivia.
She and her mother were in contact with full-time missionaries, and would take over for them when they needed a break, Mrs. Moore said.
"When they wanted to come home, if they were running an orphanage in Mexico, we would temporarily run their orphanage in Mexico," the new executive director said.
Some of her most memorable work as a missionary came in the Dominican Republic, after a hurricane.
"It was devastating for people in America," Mrs. Moore said. "But it's so much more difficult for the people there, they had straw roofs.
"You talk about mud floors and straw roofs, it's gone; it's completely leveled. Those are the kinds of things that I look back on before I took this position. I knew what it was like to live in substandard conditions."
But here in Goldsboro, where she now lives with her husband, Damon, things are looking rosier for several families, as about a dozen Habitat homes spring up at the Harris Street Estates on Harris Street.
"They're just finishing their last house now," Mrs. Moore said, saying that the last closing was scheduled around the first week of November.
Another advantage of local Habitat homes, Mrs. Moore said, is that for every such house built in Goldsboro, another is constructed in Guatemala.
"For every home that we close on here, we close on one in Guatemala," she said, adding the cost of closing a home in the country, between Mexico and Belize, is around $2,000.
Locally, as it does everywhere, Habitat for Humanity depends on the goodwill of people -- volunteer labor, money and building material donations, and "sweat equity" from people moving into the homes.
The new director of the local branch of the non-profit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry says that's something she plans to address here.
"We are an organization that depends on community giving," she said.
And, part of that mission, she said, is learning "how to really engage adults."
"I have taken the past few years, and kind of made it my mission, to learn how to engage students, young adults.
"I think it's a different challenge with engaging adults who have full-time careers and families. My mission is to really engage with the local community, to really get to know Goldsboro."