For Noel C. Green, social work is a family tradition. He’s the sixth generation of his lineage to pursue community advocacy, and has built a career uplifting Black and queer communities.
Green, CEO and founder of the organization CoLiberate USA, was recently named this year’s Sydney Thomas Health Advocacy Inductee by the Chicago Black Gay Men’s Caucus for his widespread work with Black LGBTQ Chicagoans. He was officially inducted into the Chicago Black Gay Hall of Fame June 2.
He grew up around the South Side’s Roseland and Pullman communities, and alternated his time between the city and Harvey, Illinois. His family was his first inspiration to pursue his line of work, he said.
Green’s great-great grandparents were the first members of his family to migrate from the southern U.S., after which they assisted other folks fleeing the Jim Crow South. They’d help people access housing, education about trades and other necessary information for building lives in the north. His father, a biracial man who grew up in the Jim Crow South, told Green that he didn’t know if he was doing fatherhood right all the time, but that he would always do his best.
“Now, as an adult, I realized how precious that was—that this grown man who has been through so much would be just totally transparent and honest with me,” he said. “I take that with me in the work that I do.”
Green pursued his bachelor’s degree at Grand Rapids State University, where he finally determined which branch of social work to pursue. He considered himself fortunate to have a family who loved and supported him for being queer, but many people he met did not have that experience. That inspired Green, in his professional life, to help those folks navigate difficult familial situations.
Green initially worked with Child Protective Services, where he helped teenagers dealing with hard situations. The job pushed him to also consider both developing new interventions for folks, and take this work focused on individual cases to a more systemic level.
But personal news later pushed Green in a different direction.
“I was diagnosed HIV positive in 2011,” he said. “That provoked me to really change course—actually, I changed my entire career.”
So Green took the leap into the public health sphere. He now focuses much of his work on helping helping queer folks, with or without chronic illnesses, find affirming systems and care scenarios. But he has also founded CoLiberate USA to uplift people of color in the economic sphere.
Green recalled that, when he was a child, his mother had fallen victim to an adjustable rate mortgage scheme that caused her to inevitably lose the family home.
“Imagine being 14 years old, sitting in the only home you’ve ever known…and seeing groups of people gathered on opposite sides of your lawn so they can auction your home,” he said. “It provoked me to be very interested in personal finance and think differently about what I wanted out of my life.”
After he purchased and renovated multiple properties, word got out at Green’s family church that he knew about real estate. A few people looking for information and tips soon turned into 20 or 30 people. At around the same time, Green was accepted into University of Chicago to pursue his master’s degree, and he became a scholar through the Obama Foundation.
Both these journeys caused him to dig deep as he thought about what a future project around real estate could be. He began CoLiberate USA with support from the Foundation.
Green’s organization focuses on “being a community wealth-building initiative,” he said. It offers classes with information about personal finance, investment opportunities and more. With instructors such as financial services professionals and accountants, Green said he wants a space where people can easily access the real estate resources they need.
Over the years, Green has had to hone in on what matters to him and what he wants the mission of his work to be. One aspect of that is listening to people who both critique the angles of his work and question why he’s working within a system—such as earning higher education degrees—and not dismantling it from the outside.
“Even if [my mission] does not come across, then I have to make sure that I stay true to the impact that I intend to achieve,” he said.
Today, Green feels the impact of his work for those in his community deeply. Years ago, he worked with a young Black and queer man who contracted HIV and felt his life was over. But Green helped connect the man with a team to working through Center on Halsted.
“It took some time for me to sit down with him,” he said. “He was just like, ‘If you help me to navigate this space, I’ll do my best.’ And to see him now, a person living and thriving, and doing so much better, I don’t need him to say thank you. It’s just the fact he’s alive.”
Green’s feelings about his award and induction into the Chicago Black Gay Hall of Fame at 36 years old haven’t sunk in yet. He doesn’t take the honor lightly.
“To see people which are in a system that sometimes just looks at them as being invisible, and to see them thrive, to see opportunity approach their door and they see all the limitless possibilities for them…makes my heart sing, and it’s why I wake up,” he said.