New report spotlights Alamance County’s hope-driven community change efforts

Alamance County’s latest community report argues that the county’s most familiar fault lines can be narrowed, but the strongest evidence so far is still in the work itself: five local action teams, 50-plus participants in a 2023 lab and 32 public innovators gathered for a first workspace a year later.

The report, Alamance County’s Ripples of Change: Choosing Hope Over Division, was prepared by The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation with Impact Alamance and highlighted by Impact Alamance on April 2, 2026. It follows a 2022 report, Alamance Choosing Hope: A New Path Forward for the Community, and extends a process Harwood says began with research in 2021, moved into an action phase in early 2023, and has continued through coaching and workspaces into 2025 and 2026.

Harwood describes Alamance as one of North Carolina’s fastest-growing counties, with population growth of 13.4% from 2010 to 2020. The institute also says the county’s divides run deep, involving race, economics, tensions between longtime and newer residents, geography within the county and the role of law enforcement. That history sits alongside a long record of racial conflict, including the 1870 lynching of Wyatt Outlaw in Graham and a 2016 U.S. Department of Justice settlement with Sheriff Terry Johnson over traffic-stop policing issues.

The report’s practical answer to that history is the For Alamance initiative. After a two-day Public Innovation Lab in February 2023, more than 50 people from across the county helped form five teams focused on Youth Wellness, Arts, Faith, Bridging and Narrative. Each team has a Harwood coach. By February 2024, Impact Alamance said 32 public innovators had come together for their first workspace after spending three months gathering public knowledge through conversations around the county.

Impact Alamance says the report captures how far the effort has come and argues that collaboration is growing, more voices are being heard and a more hopeful story is taking shape. The foundation says it invests $3 million annually in Alamance County communities and sees the work as driven by residents rather than outside experts. Harwood has framed the county as a place facing a blunt choice: remain stuck in division or build a civic path forward.

The bigger test is whether that optimism becomes visible in Burlington, Graham and the rest of the county in ways residents can point to, from new partnerships to reduced conflict to stronger participation. For now, the report shows a structured effort with local names, local teams and local money behind it, and a community still trying to prove that hope can become measurable change.