She Wasn't Supposed to Turn Eleven: TLC Raleigh
- Alejandro Morales
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
On Tuesday, August 4, our club welcomed Brittany Constance, Director of Strategic Impact & Outreach at TLC — founded as the Tammy Lynn Center — to Carolina Country Club. PDG David Hayden made the introduction, and for the next half hour we heard a story that started in 1969 and hasn't finished yet.
A Center Built by Parents Who Wouldn't Wait
TLC was founded in 1969 by a group of Raleigh parents who looked at the local options for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities and decided the options weren't good enough. So they built something better.
Fifty-seven years later, that decision serves 2,046 individuals and more than 4,500 family members every year across a nine-acre campus on Chappell Drive. In fiscal year 2024 alone, TLC provided 5,118 hours of respite and community-living support, connected 560 people to therapy or individual and family services, and delivered 364,848 hours of care — enough to keep residents healthy and out of the hospital on 99% of residential days. Another 285 individuals took their first steps toward identifying a delay, a disability, or a behavioral health condition.
The mission fits on one line: empowering individuals of all abilities to live their fullest life.
The Math That Doesn't Work
Brittany was candid about the finances, and this is the part that stayed with us.
Medicaid is TLC's largest funding source — and it still leaves the organization roughly $1 million short every year. A City of Raleigh grant helps. TLC's two signature fundraisers, the Golf Classic and Toast, help. But the need grows faster than the funding does.
That gap isn't an accounting problem. It's the difference between a family getting support this year and a family being told to wait.
Twenty-One Thousand Families Waiting
North Carolina keeps a waitlist for the Innovations Waiver — the Medicaid program that funds home- and community-based services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. More than 21,000 people are on it. Some families wait a decade. Some wait closer to two.
Think about what a decade means when your child is seven. Or when you're seventy and still the primary caregiver for your adult son.
June
Then Brittany showed us a photograph from TLC's 2026 campus dedication, and pointed to a woman in mauve pants.
Her name is June. When June was a child, her family was told she would never make it past her tenth birthday.
June is 53. She is the longest-thriving resident at TLC Raleigh.
There is no funding formula, no waiver slot, no line item that captures what those two sentences represent — four decades of daily care, of staff who learned her preferences, of a place that simply kept showing up. That's what TLC's Igniting Hope Together campaign is building more of: the Residents Village, a renovation of the Tucker and Civitan homes on campus. As of this summer, TLC had raised $9.68 million toward it, with about $220,000 left to go.
What TLC Actually Needs From Us
We asked the obvious question — how can we and our friends help? — and Brittany's answer was refreshingly unglamorous.
Volunteer. Then volunteer again. Nine acres of campus need mulch spread, gardens weeded, shrubs pruned, and property projects finished. There are also residential and day-program activities that need extra hands.
A few concrete ways in:
Take a tour — first Friday of every month at 9:00 AM (holidays excepted)
Show up for an event — the TLC Golf Classic on September 14, Staff Appreciation on October 16, and Toast on April 22 (club news)
Fundraise — peer-to-peer, a giveback night at a local restaurant, or a supply drive
Share the mission — the waitlist is 21,000 people long partly because most of Wake County doesn't know it exists
If disability-services partnerships are new to you, our earlier visit with Made 4 Me is a related story of neighbors who show up for families navigating disability support in Raleigh.
Why We Serve
The Four-Way Test asks whether a thing is fair to all concerned, and whether it's beneficial to all concerned. A system where 21,000 families wait a decade for help fails both questions plainly.
Rotary can't fix a state waiver list. But Service Above Self has never been about fixing everything — it's about the mulch pile, the golf tournament, the Friday morning tour, the neighbor you tell. That's the work in front of us, and it's work that TLC can actually use.
Come and Join Us
We meet Tuesdays at 7:30 AM at Carolina Country Club, and on Zoom. If TLC's story is the kind of thing you'd want to hear over coffee before your workday starts, come sit with us. Bring a friend. Better yet, come to a meeting and then come to a workday — we'd love your company at both.
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