Funny Name. Serious Impact.

If you've lived in Chapel Hill long enough, you might remember Color the Hill — hundreds of runners streaming through Finley Fields in clouds of color powder every spring. Or maybe you spotted the yard signs and banners around town, featuring kids with rainbow-streaked faces grinning like they'd just had the best day of their lives.

What you might not know is how it all started: with a $100 bill, an episode of Oprah, and a family dinner.

In 2007, Charlotte White's sister-in-law gathered the whole family for dinner — about 15 people, ages five to 85 — and handed each of them a crisp $100 bill. The instructions were simple: go do something good with it, and come back on her birthday to share the story.

Charlotte's son Kai, about five at the time, gave his to Rainbow Soccer so other kids could play. Their daughter gave hers to her art teacher at Carrboro Elementary to buy supplies the school couldn't afford. Charlotte bought movie theater gift cards and brought them to a local women and children's shelter — because going to the movies is the kind of small luxury that disappears first when life gets hard.

When the family came back together to share their stories, something clicked. Charlotte and her husband Eric decided the following year to pool their $200 and do something bigger.

Eric had been a chef with a catering business. Charlotte owned a branding studio. Together, they knew one thing for certain: they knew how to throw a party.

They hosted their first fundraiser at the Lake Hogan Farms clubhouse — a low country boil they called the Beach Shack Boil, complete with a live band and a silent auction. They raised $5,000.

"People like to party," Charlotte says. And she wasn't wrong.

But they needed a name. Eric's sister, Kim — the one who started the whole pay-it-forward tradition — had four kids. When the family signed cards together, they'd sign them "SKJAJA" — a mashup of the family's initials (Scott, Kim, Josh, Ashley, Jessica, Adam). Eric suggested it. Charlotte loved it. The SKJAJA Fund was born.

When people started asking if they were a 501(c)(3) and offering employer matching donations, they filled out the paperwork themselves. No lawyer, no accountant, no budget to hire either. "If they deny us, they deny us," Charlotte figured. "But we're not spending any money."

They didn't get denied.

What made SKJAJA different from a typical scholarship fund was baked in from the very beginning: every kid who received funding was asked to pay it forward.

Photos courtesy of Charlotte White / SKJAJA Fund

The fund covered sports, arts, and education — rec league fees, summer camp, private music lessons, tutoring, field trips. At its peak, SKJAJA was funding 100 to 150 kids a year across Chapel Hill-Carrboro. But the magic wasn't just in what the kids received. It was in what they gave back.

There was Matthew, who taught himself cello one summer through SKJAJA-funded lessons. When he needed his own instrument, the fund's PLAY It Forward program — which collects and refurbishes donated instruments — put a cello in his hands. He turned around and created a youth orchestra, teaching younger kids violin and other instruments.

Other kids took ballet, played basketball, explored whatever sparked their curiosity that year. And then there was Krissy — who, over multiple years, attended music camp in Greensboro, basketball camp, and ballet camp through SKJAJA funding. She was the kind of kid who showed up, gave back, and kept exploring. Charlotte had known Krissy's mom, Pat Richardson, through earlier community work, and watched Krissy grow up with a deep commitment to service. Krissy went on to study social work, partnered with the Chapel Hill-Carrboro YMCA's Y-Learning program to create a backpack drive for underserved students, and became exactly the kind of community-minded leader that SKJAJA's pay-it-forward model was built to nurture.

Krissy passed away in May 2021. Her mother Pat founded the Monet Richardson Community Foundation to carry on her daughter's impact and legacy — continuing the backpack program, awarding educational scholarships, and building community through events like the Running with the Angels 5K and this past Sunday's Rosé & Roses Soirée at the Graduate Hotel, which celebrated the foundation's fifth anniversary. If you're looking for a direct line between what SKJAJA planted and what's still growing in this community, Krissy's story is it.

There was a high school kid struggling in school who received guitar lessons through the fund. His social worker later reported that the guitar gave him a reason to show up every day. And there was a young woman who stood up at a SKJAJA event and told the crowd that the fund had paid for her to join Weight Watchers — and that it saved her life.

"We didn't know we were going to have that kind of impact," Charlotte says. "We were just giving them a chance to take guitar or go to camp. We didn't realize it would actually be that transformational."

By 2015, SKJAJA had grown well beyond the annual Beach Shack Boil. Charlotte's friend and board member pitched the idea of a color run. Charlotte had never heard of one. Neither of them were runners. The big national color run companies said Chapel Hill was too close to their Raleigh and Greensboro events.

So they built their own from scratch. Charlotte found a contact in Utah who sold colored powder in bulk. High school kids from the SKJAJA clubs at Chapel Hill High and East Chapel Hill High bagged pounds and pounds of it. Fleet Feet signed on as a partner. UNC student groups helped. The Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools provided school bus shuttles from the Dean Dome to Finley Fields.

The first year, 550 runners showed up — Fleet Feet told them most community events get about 100. By the final year, there were a thousand. Runners would loop the cross-country course, then come back to a party with food trucks and a live MC. It became a springtime fixture. Charlotte's son once overheard his middle school buddies say, "We know it's spring because Color the Hill is coming."

For all the big events, SKJAJA ran on an army of volunteers and a handful of dedicated people. Charlotte worked what she called part-time, but was realistically full-time. She had a part-time operations person. Board members, committee members, school social workers, SKJAJA club kids, and dozens of community volunteers kept everything moving — the applications, the SKJAJA Saturdays service projects, the PLAY It Forward instrument matching, all of it.

Charlotte also became well-known — for community work through SKJAJA, not for White Space Creative, the brand strategy studio she'd been running since 1997. "Everyone knew SKJAJA," she says. "Nobody knew about White Space." She credits the organization with making her less introverted. She went from someone who wouldn't speak in front of a room to someone who could stand in front of 100 people — half of them strangers — and talk about SKJAJA's impact and raise money.

Charlotte stepped back from day-to-day operations around 2021. The board continues to fund kids, and the PLAY It Forward instrument program — originally sparked by a volunteer named Diana — is still going strong, now run by a retired orchestra teacher who's been growing its reach through grants from WCPE, the Triangle's classical music station.

Over its lifetime, SKJAJA has served more than 2,880 young people in Chapel Hill-Carrboro. The tagline Charlotte came up with years ago still holds: Funny name. Serious rewards.

These days, Charlotte focuses on the brand strategy and design studio she founded in 1997, White Space Creative. She works with growing service-based businesses and nonprofits that struggle with a scattered brand and unclear messaging so they can confidently focus on their services and attract more customers.

The studio name is a nod to both a design principle (great design needs room to breathe) and a happy coincidence: her last name is White.

You can find Charlotte at wearewhitespace.com and SKJAJA at skjajafund.org.

If you have an instrument collecting dust in a closet, SKJAJA's PLAY It Forward program would love to hear from you. And if you know a K-12 student in Chapel Hill-Carrboro who could benefit from extracurricular funding, applications are accepted on a rolling basis through the school district's Family Specialists.

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