who’s who
in town & county government CHATHAM COUNTY PUBLIC HEALTH DEPARTMENT WELCOMED ITS FIRST DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION OFFICER BY ANNA-RHESA VERSOLA PHOTO BY JOHN MICHAEL SIMPSON
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didn’t want me to go to school in that neighborhood. … She wanted [me] to have education with children [who] did not necessarily look like [me]. … My mom put me in school in Douglaston-Little Neck, [a different neighborhood in Queens]. I can go back and look at my elementary school pictures, and there were only a handful of Black kids in the class and everyone else was Caucasian. Why did my mom do that? Why was that so important to her to do that? Well, now I understand that we should be interacting with people who don’t look like [us]. They need to understand you, and you need to understand them. So that is what I grew up around. And you know, New York is a melting pot. Queens is a melting pot. And I think all of that gave me a different perspective.
renda Clegg was born in Sanford and was 5 years old when her family moved to Queens, New York. She earned a Bachelor of Science in biology from Rutgers University in New Jersey and a second bachelor’s degree from New York Institute of Technology in interdisciplinary studies with a focus on life sciences. She began her human resources career as the New York Metropolitan Amateur Athletic Union’s district sport director, spending more than 10 years in the position. Afterward, Brenda took on roles in Pennsylvania to improve internal business functions, including cultural sensitivity training for staff and enhancing external community engagement. Brenda, the youngest of five siblings, returned to Sanford in 2015 to care for her late father, Alfred Frank Clegg, for two years. On July 5, Brenda became Chatham County Public Health Department’s first diversity, equity and inclusion officer. Her adult son, Justin Brown, and grandson, 7, live in Sanford, while her adult daughter, Tahvia Brown, is in New York.
What do you think prepared you for this job?
I believe my life experiences prepared me for this job. … I remember my [maternal] grandmother, a very proud woman, here in North Carolina, and how she would talk to me and tell me she had great expectations for me. … And so in the back of my mind, everything I did, I always wanted to make my grandmother proud of me. But then going to New York, the neighborhood we moved into was a middle-class, predominantly African American neighborhood. As a matter of fact, the family next door to me was from Haiti. We were African American from North Carolina. The family on the other side was from Jamaica. My mom 26
CHATHAM MAGAZINE
Being the first one means there’s a lot for me to do and figure out because no one else has done the job before.
FEBRUARY / MARCH 2023
What work did you do before your current position?
Before I came here, I was doing DEI training, but I also was in staffing, business development and sales. [I was] going into companies from Lumberton to Smithville, talking to them about employment, job culture,