Isay Gulley continues to look to the future

As NeighborWorks America highlights stories about the work of individuals and nonprofits in our network, those stories may sometimes relate painful or traumatizing experiences. Isay Gulley's personal narrative includes her experience with threats and racism, which led to her determination for homeownership not only for her family, but for others in her community.

Isay Gulley believes you have to have more than a job; you have to have a goal and mission in your

heart. For her, housing became all three. As she retires from Clearwater Neighborhood Housing Services, the NeighborWorks network organization where she worked for nearly 41 years, she talks about an experience that shaped her, making her think about home and what it meant.

Her memory of that time begins on the front porch of her home in Shorter, Alabama, with her mother and her sister. Two men, members of the Ku Klux Klan, had stepped onto her front porch, too. ”They told my mom she had 24 hours to vacate the premises or they were going to burn the house down,” relates Gulley. "In 24 hours, we were on a truck with as much as we could carry to a farmhouse about five miles away.”

Gulley's parents, who were separated at the time, had been in the process of buying their property. "I still have the deed,” she says. Instead, she, her sister and her mother began working on a plantation in order to cover the rent of a tiny house that never felt like their own. They picked corn and cotton. Shaken and angry, Gulley would tell herself: "Whenever I get grown, I want to buy a home and raise my kids up in their own place.” 

It would be a safe place, too. Gulley and her husband realized those hopes with a starter house in Safety Harbor, Florida, and then a larger house in Clearwater, Florida. She helped build safe places for other families, too, as a leader and then executive director of Clearwater Neighborhood Housing Services, Inc. (CNHS). 

A Coast Guard reservist, Gully spent the bulk of her career with the NeighborWorks network organization, which is changing its name to Tampa Bay Neighborhood Housing Services. She retired this summer but continues to work as a consultant. The nonprofit leader, who has keys to her own home, a key to the City of Clearwater, and a Head Start early learning center named after her in North Greenwood, isn't done helping people.

When she started as an outreach officer in 1980, communities in Clearwater faced a host of challenges, including code issues and the displacement of individuals who had lost their jobs. Banks were redlining. "Community pride was low,” she says. 

CNHS was charged with fostering change, with Gulley at the helm. She is quick to point out that the achievements in Clearwater didn't come just because of CNHS. "We couldn't do it by ourselves. We joined forces with the public and private sectors, the business community and the community-at-large.”

She points to a revitalization partnership known as Palmetto Park Apartments as a central achievement. The 225-unit building was the most dilapidated in the upper part of Pinellas County, "99% blight,” Gulley says. For 10 years, she asked the board of directors if they might tackle it, even though CNHS had not yet made the foray into multi-family housing. "We were building houses around it. We were also making loans to businesses. But I could not see where we could truly achieve neighborhood revitalization unless we cured the cancer in the middle,” Gulley says.

One day, as she was taking leaders from Bank of America on a tour of properties, a leader asked if there was anything else Bank of America could do to help achieve revitalization. "I drove the van right into the complex and I stopped,” Gulley says. "One of the bankers asked: 'Do people really live here?' At that very time, a little old lady walked out the front door. It put a spark in the banker's heart.” The bank became one of the revitalization effort's seven partners, which included NeighborWorks America. NeighborWorks provided $200,000 to CNHS so it could be a partner with ownership interests. CNHS was able to register the development with NeighborWorks' multi-family initiative.

Gulley is proud that "What made it easier to stay all those years is partners like NeighborWorks America,” Gulley says. "I wouldn't have stayed this long if I didn't have the support. There are a lot of people I got close to over the years.” That includes NeighborWorks CEOs across the country – she believes she knows every one of them. And that includes Regional Vice President Donald Phoenix.

"She really does know everybody,” says Phoenix, who met Gulley when he was a new executive director of Neighborhood Housing Services of Savannah. "She became my mentor,” he says. "She took me under her wing and helped me to understand how to appreciate the contributions of residents as much as funders; that it was resident leadership that could really make a difference in a community.”
Gulley's "lessons learned” from her time as CEO include:  

• You have to be mission-driven. "Something has to connect you to the mission to make you want to drive that train,” Gulley says. "You've got to have your motivational factors from within.”
• Patience and more patience. "One of the things I tag in my life is the serenity prayer: You have to accept the things you cannot change, change the things you can, and have the wisdom to know the difference. I live by that.”
• Share your successes. "Share those successes and bring others along to celebrate.”
• Overcome your fear of failure. "Some leaders don't want to try because they think, 'What if I fail?' You've got to overcome that. You've got to learn endurance.”

During retirement, Gulley will continue to consult, and she expects to become CNHS's busiest volunteer. She might consider political opportunities, but not until she's spent a year just being with family. After surgery for pancreatic cancer nearly two years ago, she is getting pressure from her husband and children to take it easy. Gulley is humoring them – for now. 

"I told my kids my motto is 'I want to live, not just exist,'” she says. "You live and you give of yourself to help others.”