Nicholtown is Free To Thrive!

Help Sustaining Way raise $10,000 by October 16th and create the conditions where everyone is Free to Thrive! 

Founded in 2012, Sustaining Way is an interfaith nonprofit serving the Nicholtown community and greater Greenville, South Carolina. We use education, collaboration and workforce development to build a thriving, sustainable community and environment.  The historic Nicholtown community located in the “heart” of Greenville, SC was founded by African American families in the early 1900s.  Over the years, Nicholtown became a thriving self-sufficient community with an array of community resources. Today, Nicholtown is a food desert with many residents facing a combination of low incomes and rising housing costs that make it difficult for community members to continue to thrive here. 

Free to Envision a Sustainable Future
Sustaining Way opened Annie’s House in the Nicholtown community in 2015. Annie's House is a model affordable, highly efficient home which demonstrates sustainable practices, serves as an education center and base of operations in Nicholtown, and houses community coordinators who lead our programs while participating in our leadership development program.

Sustainable practices demonstrated on-site focus on offering solutions for challenges commonly faced by community members -- lack of access to healthy, affordable food, lack of access to personal transportation, substandard housing and resulting exorbitant energy costs, and high rates of chronic health conditions. The sustainable living solutions we present include urban agriculture, energy efficiency and production and sustainable home construction and refurbishment. 

Free to Create Change
Our programs empower youth and adults to develop personal knowledge and sustainability work experience, communication skills, management and teamwork skills, and civic engagement and problem solving skills. Our Steward Youth program educates and empowers youth to use sustainable practices to improve their lives and to advocate for a sustainable future for all.

These efforts are combined with community education and advocacy to introduce sustainable practices as solutions to the community and to address systemic racism in the social structures that have prohibited the Nicholtown community’s progress.

Free to Live Well
In 2019, Sustaining Way led community education and outreach around energy efficiency and through partnering with a local utility company helped over 1,000 homes in Nicholtown receive weatherization and energy efficiency upgrades! We are continuing this work with energy efficiency home visits and connecting residents to available resources to make home repairs and energy efficiency upgrades.

Sustaining Way also works to increase access to healthy, affordable food in the Nicholtown community by supporting the Nicholtown Community Garden and growing organic food at Annie's House. Starting soon, we will begin pop-up gardening with Nicholtown residents.

We hope you will join us on this journey as we work to empower communities to become Free to Thrive!