Terri Brown
Founder/President
Terri Brown did not come to this work from comfort. She grew up experiencing poverty, instability, and the uncertainty that comes when systems meant to support families do not always work as intended. Those experiences shaped a lifelong interest in understanding why some systems create stability while others reinforce hardship.
Her professional career gave her another perspective on those questions. Terri's background includes work in financial services, banking, insurance, and securities, where she learned to evaluate risk, incentives, financial structures, and outcomes. That experience reinforced a belief that good intentions alone are not enough. Systems should be evaluated by the fruit they actually produce.
West Virginia was also the place Terri kept trying to come home to. After leaving WVU, she spent 23 years working toward a return to the state that had provided a sense of belonging and comfort in her life. She finally returned in April 2025. A year later, the ideas she had carried about how to help the state she loved could no longer remain only ideas. Agape Community Works Foundation was formed in May 2026.
Those experiences came together in her thinking about housing and rural economic decline. Problems such as housing instability, limited opportunity, population loss, and declining community resources do not operate independently. They reinforce one another. Terri began developing approaches around the opposite premise: if problems can reinforce problems, solutions should be designed to reinforce solutions.
That thinking led first to the Tenant Stability Program and ultimately to Agape's broader model. Agape was created to put those ideas into practice, measure the fruit they produce, learn from the evidence, and demonstrate whether investing in people and the communities where they live can create stronger and more lasting economic outcomes.
Eddyth Hope Buckingham
Director
Eddyth Hope Buckingham is, in the truest sense, a West Virginia original. Her roots run deep in the soil of this state, not simply as a metaphor but as a lived reality. She knows what it means to grow things, to tend them with patience, and to understand that what comes from the earth requires care, commitment, and the willingness to show up season after season regardless of what the weather brings.
Eddyth also knows poverty from lived experience. Her life has not been untouched by financial hardship, but it has been grounded in the stability of family, community, and a deep connection to place. That combination gives her a perspective important to Agape: understanding what it means to have little without believing that having little means a life has little value.
That same understanding governs how she moves through the world. Eddyth has built a life around generosity, not the occasional kind that feels good in the moment, but the steady, habitual generosity of someone who has simply decided that caring for the people and creatures around her is what a life is for. Family and friends are not obligations to be managed. They are the point.
She brings to the Agape board something that cannot be taught and is rarely found in governance documents: the wisdom of a life well and generously lived. She knows her neighbors. She knows this community. She knows what it looks like when people are genuinely cared for and what it costs when they are not.
In a mission built on dignity, restoration, and the conviction that people are worth investing in, Eddyth brings the voice of someone deeply rooted in the place Agape exists to serve. She helps keep our ideas connected to the soil from which they are meant to grow.
Perla Pierce
Director
Perla Pierce brings to Agape's board a perspective forged in the complexity of urban life, the particular kind of strength that develops when you learn early that the systems around you were not designed with you in mind, and you choose to show up anyway.
Perla knows poverty and instability from lived experience. Her experience with the harder edges of urban life gave her an understanding of what instability can demand from people, but it also gave her an appreciation for something easily taken for granted: the value of peace, stability, and having a place where you can simply feel safe. She brings both perspectives to Agape.
As a Latina woman, she has navigated spaces that did not always make room for her and built presence in them not by asking permission, but by understanding deeply: people, systems, community dynamics, and the specific ways that faith becomes not merely a comfort but a compass when the road is uncertain. That understanding is not abstract. It is lived.
Family has been both her anchor and her education. For Perla, family has never been defined strictly by blood. It has been defined by choice, by the people who showed up, stayed, and built something together regardless of what the paperwork said. That understanding of community, chosen, committed, and rooted in mutual care, is precisely the kind of community Agape seeks to strengthen.
Perla joins this board because the mission is personal. She understands that stability is about more than a building or an address. It is the space in which family, however we define it, can take root. She brings to Agape a fierce insistence that people deserve not simply somewhere to survive, but somewhere they can choose to belong.
Come Meet Our Team
Our Values
Dignity
Dignity is not something that is earned or granted.
It is not a reward for good behavior or a benefit extended only to those who qualify.
Every person who walks through our doors, regardless of their history, their income, their circumstances, or their mistakes, carries inherent worth that no financial crisis can diminish and no eviction notice can erase.
At Agape we do not help people despite their difficulties. We work alongside them because of our shared humanity. That distinction shapes every policy we write, every conversation we have, and every decision we make about how this organization operates. Dignity is not a value we aspire to. It is the floor: the non-negotiable starting point from which everything else is built.
Restoration
Restoration begins with an honest look at what has fallen — and the conviction that falling is not the final word. Rural Appalachia and, in particular, West Virginia's communities have absorbed decades of institutional loss. Schools have closed. Buildings have emptied. People have left because the conditions that make a life possible were no longer present.
Agape exists in the belief that what has been lost can be reclaimed — not returned to what it was, but rebuilt into something that serves the people who are here now, those who want to come to the area and the generations who will follow. Restoration is not nostalgia. It is the active, practical work of rebuilding the conditions that make community possible — one property, one family, one repaired relationship between landlord and tenant at a time.
Together dignity and restoration are not decorative words on a mission statement. They are the operating instructions.
And the foundation of both of these, Dignity and Restoration, is Agape: Unconditional Love
Our Mission
Agape Community Works Foundation works to reverse rural decline in West Virginia by building stable, dignified housing and the local economy that sustains it. Not for our neighbors, but with them.
That single word, with, is the entire philosophy.
For too long the relationship between housing providers and the people they house has been transactional at best and adversarial at worst. Tenants as problems to be managed. Landlords as obstacles to be navigated. A system designed around enforcement rather than stability, around extraction rather than investment, around the assumption that the people who need housing most are also the people least capable of participating in decisions about it.
The same pattern holds at the community scale. Rural America has spent generations exporting its value, in resources and in people, and receiving little back. Agape was built on the opposite conviction.
A home is where it starts, but a home alone will not hold a family in a place that offers them nothing else. So we build in three directions at once. Stable housing, protected by a fund that stops evictions before they start. Local economic opportunity, through workspace, small business incubation, and training brought within reach of the people who need it. And the financial knowledge that lets a family keep and grow what stability makes possible.
We do this by putting back to work the buildings these communities already own. Schools that closed, civic buildings left empty. Structures built for the public, returned to public benefit, without sacrificing the land and history that make these places worth staying in.
And we build for the people who are not here yet. In an era of urban overcrowding, rural communities have something to offer that cities cannot. Roots grow deeper in soil than in concrete.
The people who live in our properties are not passive recipients of our generosity. They are participants in a community we are building together. Their voices shape how we operate. Their stability is the measure of our success. Their dignity is not a program feature. It is the foundation the entire organization stands on.
We do not arrive in communities with a plan and ask people to fit into it. We arrive with a framework, financially disciplined, evidence driven, and grounded in decades of research, and we build within it alongside the people who already know these communities better than any outside organization ever could.
Not for our neighbors. With them.
That is not a slogan. It is a commitment, to every tenant, every community partner, every donor, and every person whose life this organization has the privilege of touching.
Our Work is Like a Tree
Rooted in Dignity and Community Restoration, Protected by Financial Literacy
Progress can better a life, but there is also a need for deep roots and lasting traditions. At Agape, we are fighting to give those values a chance to flourish again. Life in rural America holds assets that no amount of growth or convenience can replace: a heritage passed down through generations, a working knowledge of land and craft earned through experience, a respect for people that shows up in how neighbors treat each other, and a stewardship of natural resources that comes from actually depending on them. These are not relics of the past, they are the foundation rural communities can rebuild on, if given the chance.
After the Roots take hold, it is then time to develop the covering that keeps the tree healthy. Knowledge is one of the most protective tools we have to maintain and grow further what we have fought for. It is the capstone. Agape's work without helping forge those tools would be incomplete. That forge isn't for one person, or company it is done through a network of partnership that see the same value in financial literacy.
