Founder of Crisis Assistance Ministry reflects on 50 years of housing activism
Caroline Love Myers had no reason to believe a 10-hour per week, part-time job she took at a Charlotte church 50 years ago would be anything more than a favor to her pastor.
He wanted to hire a minister of missions, but the church couldn’t afford it, Myers said. So she took on the role’s responsibilities.
That decision would have a greater impact than Myers could have predicted. The job became her career and legacy. And the nonprofit born out of it would become one of the city’s most important and iconic organizations: Crisis Assistance Ministry.
“You saw a lot of need,” Myers said.
Myers reflected on Crisis Assistance Ministry’s evolution from a scout hut behind Dilworth Methodist Church in 1975 to the city’s go-to agency for housing insecurity matters in an interview with The Charlotte Observer.
Half a century ago, Myers, with an army of volunteers, was instrumental in that evolution.
“Well, I just feel so fortunate to be so involved in life at the age of 92 and to be healthy, and have a loving family and a great legacy here at Crisis Assistance,” Myers said. “What more can I ask for?
70s economic issues
Myers has been living in Charlotte since she was one month old, she said. She grew up in a home on Providence Road that has long been in her family.
Her mother died when she was 10, and so her 18-year-old sister stepped up to help keep the family together, Myers said. But Myers also realized she would have to do many things for herself.
Myers, a devout Presbyterian, said she’s always been active in the church and made her profession of faith in seventh grade. She graduated from Queens University in 1955 and was told by the university president that Charlotte Country Day needed a math teacher. She worked there for a year before the university president called again and asked that she work at the registrar’s office.
She always planned to work after graduation, she said, but never had to apply for jobs. This continued in 1974 when her pastor at Covenant Presbyterian Church asked her to work part-time as the director of community mission.
“It was during that recession of ‘74, ‘75 that unemployment was just really tremendous, and people were coming to the church all the time asking for help,” Myers said. “I was drafting volunteers to help me. We did a food pantry — we did a lot of things there — and then realized that other churches had the same problem.”
Learning from other organizations
At the time, there was a group called the Charlotte Area Clergy Association that reached out to Myers and others involved in the faith community about an organization in Winston-Salem called Crisis Control Ministry.
She and four other people piled into a car, in January 1975, and made the drive to see what kind of work they were doing. Myers said that visit helped her envision what would become Crisis Assistance Ministry.
“They had a couple of big foundations who could help them financially to do what they were doing,” Myers said. “But they were just wonderful in giving us some forms they were using and things like that.”
Those forms would help volunteers gather information needed to verify people’s situations — an eviction, utility shutoffs, or food stamps, among other issues — to make sure the nonprofit could help them.
Myers also learned the Winston-Salem organization had been working with the state Department of Social Services. Because she didn’t have much experience in social work or what social services could offer, she asked if she could attend training for new employees.
Crisis Assistance Ministry opens
After hunting down funding and recruiting volunteers, Crisis Assistance Ministry opened its doors on April 16, 1975, Myers said. The organization was only at the Dilworth Methodist Church for a couple of months before St. Martin’s Episcopal Church called offering more space.
The nonprofit leased a building from the church for $1 per year, Myers said.
“It was a great location, and we really served lots and lots of people from that place,” she said.
And the organization was immediately busy, Myers said. She would often come to work and find her desk covered with pink slips from people and other churches waiting on her to return calls.
The line of people waiting to meet with a volunteer, who worked as counselors, would often wrap around the building, she said. She would get day-old Krispy Kreme donuts and brew large pots of coffee for the people waiting to meet with a counselor to go over their paperwork.
Her hope was that other churches and places of worship would hear about Crisis Assistance Ministry’s services and want to work with the group, Myers said. And it worked.
“If this church out in Mint Hill or somewhere is deciding they’re going to help, what we were trying to do was to coordinate it all ,” she said. “Put the resources together in one place, so that the customer … doesn’t have to go to this place and this place and this place to get the help.”
An example, she said, was an effort to give out free clothing. At first, Crisis helped coordinate providing free clothing at different churches around the city each day of the week, that way people could always access it. But eventually Mecklenburg County gave them a space on 7th Street besides some railroad tracks to store the clothes.
“It was … where they stored voting machines, and they let us use some of that space to provide clothing,” she said.
Greatest needs
Often the greatest need of their clients was help financially. Clients met with counselors in private interviews to review their cases.
If they were being evicted or having their utilities shut off, they brought a notice. The organization would then call social services or Duke Power (now Duke Energy) to try to delay or resolve the matter.
One issue that took some creative maneuvering was food stamps, Myers said. Food was the biggest need the nonprofit was dealing with in its first two years. And in the 1970s, not long after food stamps were first introduced, people had to buy literal stamps from their local post office.
People would qualify based on their household size, Myers said. But they would have to use their income to buy the stamps. If a household qualified for a couple of hundred dollars worth of food stamps, they would have to spend some of their income to buy them, she said.
The postmaster at the Dilworth post office let Crisis send people with a check and signed letter from Covenant Presbyterian Church, Myers said.
“If you were going to help them with food then that was the best way to do it,” she said.
Moving locations, becoming own nonprofit
In the 1980s, Crisis Assistance Ministry underwent two major changes. The first, in 1985, saw the organization get its own nonprofit status after first operating under the Charlotte Area Clergy Association.
In 1988, Crisis moved into its current location on Spratt Street just outside of uptown Charlotte.
That provided more space, and resources in the immediate area. The Salvation Army of Greater Charlotte shelter is next door. And across the parking lot is Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina. It made coordination between the organizations easier.
And over the years, the city has come to rely on Crisis for mass displacement response, such as when two motels in Hidden Valley were shut down and 15 people needed to be relocated in 2023.
In 2024, Crisis helped relocate 68 people from a west Charlotte hotel after it was shut down for its poor conditions.
“If you ever interview one of these people in need, I don’t know how you cannot want to do something,” Myers said.
Myers gave credit to the volunteers for making sure Crisis Assistance Ministry has been able to help so many people over the years. They’re deeply devoted, she said, and have occasionally become employees at the nonprofit.
One previous volunteer, who eventually became an employee, would show up an hour early each day to open the nonprofit’s doors just to make sure people didn’t have to wait outside in the cold.
“I think people don’t do this kind of work without that kind of commitment,” Myers said.
Passing the torch
Myers also credited Crisis’s current CEO, Carol Hardison, with making sure the organization has kept up with Charlotte’s growth.
And it’s because of Hardison that she was able to step away 25 years ago, in 2000, to pass the torch.
“I was almost 67 … I would love to have worked longer, but my husband needed my support as he entered into Lewy body dementia,” Myers said. But “I just knew that … [Hardison] was the one.”
Myers also gained more time to spend with family. She has four children and five grandchildren that she called the “shining light” of her life.
“I’m mighty proud of them,” she said. “I didn’t know they were going to be so good.”
They’re all spread out, she said, but her three granddaughters have, in their own ways, followed Myers.
Each works in environmental science in some kind of capacity, Myers said.
One is in policy, one works at the Catawba Land Conservancy, and the other does field work with environmental resources management in Atlanta.
“They’re going to save the planet,” Myers said. “It’s the same thing. Why do we want to preserve the environment? We want to do it for people.”
This story was originally published December 30, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
