The North Carolina Community Foundation provides opportunities to create funds that honor family members and benefit the local community. The Family Cooperative fund and its collaboration with the Duplin County Community Foundation is a prime example.

The story of the fund begins with the Smith family.

Clifton Clayton Smith and Marie Bagget were both high school valedictorians who married, had five children and traveled the country while Clifton served in the Marine Corps.

Every few years, while Clifton was deployed overseas, the family would settle in Duplin County. It was in the 1960s during segregation, a challenging time for Black families in the South like the Smiths.

Of the four surviving siblings, three still reside in North Carolina: Debra Smith Morrisey, Clifton Smith and Clayton Smith. They remember the racial slurs. They cannot forget how restaurant owners refused to let them inside to eat or even use the bathroom, forcing them to go outside.

They also recall happier memories, like their mother’s open-door policy at home. “Any child in the neighborhood that needed a place to go would end up at the house,” said Debra.

“Our parents instilled in us that it is better to give than to receive, and that’s so important,” added Clifton.

With a foundation of generosity, hard work and education, all five Smith siblings graduated college. “And all of us ended up with positions and degrees that somehow aimed to help the public,” said Debra.

Like their father, Clifton and Clayton joined the military. While in the Air Force, Clayton met Judy Brown, a kindhearted English woman he would later marry. “Judy was a class act,” he said. “She was very supportive of the underdogs.”

Judy also grew up in a philanthropic household and devoted her life to public service, traversing the globe to help women and children who had survived domestic abuse. At age 42, she joined Voluntary Service Overseas, the British version of the Peace Corps. After she retired, Judy traveled to Belize to care for domestic abuse survivors. She wanted to make it her life’s work. “Judy did it for about four years, and then she became sick,” Clayton said.

In 2020, Judy was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.

Though devastated, Clayton and Judy used the time they had left together to find a way to help the causes they cared about most. Clayton contacted his sister, Debra, who is Vice President of the Duplin County Community Foundation, an NCCF affiliate. “(NCCF) is one of the best organizations I have ever been involved with. The focal point has always been to help the community,” she said.

With NCCF, Clayton and Judy created Family Cooperative, a donor advised fund to support youth education, animal welfare, domestic violence victims and services for seniors in Duplin County and Belize. Clayton said he chose the name “Family Cooperative” because “our family has always helped each other help their community.”

About a month after the fund originated, Judy passed away. But her philanthropic legacy lives on.

Since 2022, Family Cooperative has distributed more than $20,000 to nonprofits, including support for annual grants awarded by the Duplin County Community Foundation. “It is our responsibility to lend a hand,” said Debra, who now advises the fund with Clayton. “The one thing that keeps us going is cooperation.”

For Clayton, the desire to give back stems not only from his family’s generosity, but from the atrocities he witnessed in other countries while serving in the Air Force. “I have seen vulcanization, a total breakdown of society. I do not want that to happen here,” he said, while also recalling his time growing up during segregation. “That’s the reason I focus on Duplin County. It reminds me what we were in this nation and of what we can easily go back to without having common courtesy for one another.”