NeighborWorks America's 2024 Dorothy Richardson Awardee: Elnora Jefferson

Alot changed between the time Elnora Q. Tellis Easley Jefferson grew up in Northeast Wyandotte County and the time she moved back to the neighborhood of her youth.

“It was ingrained in us as we were growing up that we would go to college and get those jobs our parents and grandparents could not get,” she says.

Elnora Jefferson looks proudly at the camera.So that’s what she did. Her generation broke through some of the systemic racism that had affected her parents, and she left home to follow a new path. She went to the University of Kansas, studying French and German and going overseas. She returned to Kansas and Missouri to work at AT&T and raise her family. But in 1998, after the deaths of her father and brother, she retired to care for her mother in the neighborhood where she’d gotten her start.

It turned out that her community needed care, too.