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on January 06, 2013 at 12:16 AM, updated January 06, 2013 at 1:15 AM
This feature is part of "I Am New Jersey," a Star-Ledger series profiling some of the people who make the Garden State special.
We have found Superwoman.
Consider her credentials and see what I mean.
She left a state job at the age of 24 to start a foundation in Newark that helps at-risk children and poor families escape hellish conditions she knows all too well.
She calls herself the residue of the 1980s, a kid from the crack era that ravaged cities and her Newark family. She says her teenage-prostitute mother traded her for sex with drugs, when she was 7. Her dad, a convicted murderer, was an addict, too. Both lost their battle to drugs, dying from AIDS.
Christine Carter lived everywhere, it seems, before clawing her way to college on a full scholarship. She moved 14 times, from Newark public housing developments to shelters, foster homes to group homes. Abusive relatives and the streets were in the mix, too.
Despite all this, in only 31 years, she has created a foundation for underdogs — like she was once — called Against All Odds, which tells the underdogs they can make it.
"My story is the story of many," Carter says. "Against All Odds exists solely to ensure that one child’s success becomes the norm and not the exception."
She started with nothing six years ago, but her organization grew to employ 15 full-time and 150 part-time employees in after-school programs offering a buffet of social services.
Only one time has this survivor had doubts about herself or the ultimate success of her mission. It happened on a recent night at Christian Love Baptist Church in Irvington.
While telling her story, she began to cry and she couldn’t stop. It was not that her marriage ended last year or her two children — Caidance, 9, and Christian, 5 — would have to adjust. Or that she was thinking about her Nana, the great-grandmother — now gone — who tried to raise her at Seth Boyden, a Newark public housing complex on the demolition blocks.
Carter had just gotten word that social agencies like hers in the state lost federal funding for their programs. A week later, she learned the community center she supports with her own money had to move sooner than expected. For the first time, she was not sure about her work, shaken that things seem to be falling apart.
"Why me?" she said to the church. "I never asked God that before."
Faythe Allen and Carol Mitchell know she’ll make it. They’ve seen her strength as a student at the old Clifford Scott High School in East Orange.
No one knew the prom queen and class president was homeless. No one knew she carried books in a suitcase or that she washed up in the bathroom. "That’s how well she hid it," says Allen, her teacher. "She never complained. She had an inward motivation we don’t see often in our young people."
Carter was shouldering adult responsibilities that many adults can’t handle. She worked two jobs — one at a day care center, the other at a Wendy’s after she forged her birth certificate to say she was old enough for employment.
Even though she got home well past midnight, Carter was never late for school. On Sundays, she stayed in church, singing in the choir, joining the junior usher board.
Her independence is something that made a lasting impression on Mitchell, who hired Carter to work at Sears, her next gig after Wendy’s.
"I’ve never seen anyone at 15 manage a checkbook," Mitchell says. "I couldn’t figure out why she was doing it."
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She used the money for Lamar, her kid brother she kept tabs on.
No one knew that, either.
Carter had no time to be coddled, no one to kiss her wounds. She was failing her classes until Allen sat her down and got her focused, telling her that education was her way out of the mess she was in.
"She knew that when she walked across that stage at graduation, she had to have a plan," Allen says.
Carter pulled straight A’s her senior year, then packed up a U-haul and drove to Norfolk State University on a full scholarship. She graduated with a degree in social work, putting it to use with the state Division of Youth and Family Services.
After a year, Carter was on the move again, this time to start her foundation in 2006 with a bank loan. It was a risky move and not practical, but Carter did it anyway. Like most who run nonprofits, she struggled — until her organization took off after it received a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
Carter’s is a story many want to hear. And when they do, audiences are captivated, listening intensely, hanging on her every word.
At Newark Emergency Services, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room when she finished talking to clients about resilience. Many of them opened up to her, sharing their personal hell as she walked the room, hugging them after a session that lasted nearly three hours.
She was so riveting the agency brought her back a week later, making the life skills workshop its most popular one to date.
"The room was just as full and people brought their friends," says Deneen Jackson, deputy executive director of programs and services. "She made them feel like they could take on the world."
That’s hard to do in a city where nonprofit organizations seem to come and go. One of her biggest supporters, Rep. Donald Payne Jr., mistakenly thought Carter was another fly-by-night person with grand intentions when he first met her.
"At times I call Newark the ‘Non-profits R Us’ because everybody wants to start one," Payne Jr. says. "But she’s different. She’s putting clothes on kids’ backs, making junkies go to rehab. She’s one of the few who does the work. When she says she’s on it, she’s on it."
Carter is constantly on her cell phone, its screen filled with text messages, figuring out ways to fund her organization. She works with other community groups, showing them how to make their programs successful. In the midst of it all, she continues to be a constant source of encouragement for others, finding little time for herself to wind down.
Right now she’s mentoring a 16-year-old girl whose mother recently died. And she’s keeping track of Minnie Cuevas, a Newark woman who latched onto her for guidance after they met two months ago.
"She gives me a sense of motivation," Cuevas says. "She’s in tune with me and I’m in tune with her. I’m about action right now."
Carter, who is driven by a passion to serve, doesn’t mind giving back this way. It keeps her sane and purposeful, knowing things will get better if you’re willing to get your act together.
"This is God’s work," she told the church that night she cried. "It’s the only plausible explanation for the hell I went through."
Carter is not bitter about her life, although she often wonders what triggered her parents’ path to addiction. She thinks about her mom, especially this time of year because she died on Christmas Eve.
In her own way, Carter has let go of the past with forgiveness so she can move on and not slide into the mode of victim.
"There’s no ‘Woe is me,’ there is no pity party," she says. "It’s always ‘How I can turn this around and help somebody else?’ Otherwise it was all for nothing."
After she dried her tears at church, Carter looked out from the pulpit and urged the congregation to lean on her if they needed help.
No one did.
They wanted her to lean on them instead. About 60 people came up after the benediction and offered to volunteer with her organization.
"God is getting ready to do something great in your life," Pastor Ron Christian said that night.
Weeks later, the unexpected happened.
The federal funding for New Jersey community-based organizations like hers was reinstated. And she found a new home for her community center, too.
"I’m still standing," Carter says. "After everything, I’m still standing through it all."
After beating odds like those, how can she go wrong?
Photos: NJ.com
Photo Captions: Christine Carter of Newark has created a foundation for underdogs - like she was once - called Against All Odds, which tells the underdogs they can make it. Jennifer Brown/The Star-Ledger
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