Meet the daughter of West Virginia coal miners who unseated Mecklenburg’s Pat Cotham
While everyone around her celebrated an at-large seat victory in the Democratic primary for the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners Tuesday night, Yvette Townsend-Ingram analyzed the results.
Despite pulling off one of the biggest upsets of the night, knocking off longtime incumbent Pat Cotham for one of three seats, Townsend-Ingram couldn’t help but focus on the precincts she didn’t win.
According to the unofficial results, Townsend-Ingram received 23.76% of the total votes, while Cotham received 17.58%.
Townsend-Ingram was the top vote-getter in a couple of precincts in north Charlotte, including 212 where she got 1,024 total votes, and precinct 211 where she won 875 votes. In south Charlotte, Townsend-Ingram came in fourth at a couple precincts, including 110, where she received 88 votes, and precinct 8 where she received 101 votes.
“‘What do they not know about me? Why did they not vote for me? Why did they overwhelmingly vote for another candidate over me?’” Townsend-Ingram recalled in an interview with the Observer on Thursday. “If I didn’t get even 100 votes in that precinct, I was like, ‘Oh, what did I do? Or not do? Because that’s the type of person I am. I’m kind of a perfectionist.”
Eventually, after some convincing from those around her, Townsend-Ingram began to soak it all in.
Because there is no Republican opposition in November, Townsend-Ingram, the director of foundation relations at Johnson C. Smith University, is nearly guaranteed to be one of the next county commissioners.
Service-oriented since the beginning
For Townsend-Ingram, servant leadership is not just one of her goals, she said, but a way of life.
“I think that where I come from led me down a path to servant leadership,” she said.
The daughter and granddaughter of West Virginia coal miners, Townsend-Ingram said she grew up watching income sources dry up in her area as coal mines and steel mills shut down.
Her parents would often take her with them to polls even before she could vote. So she understood the importance of being civic-minded.
In college, while attending the historically Black West Virginia State University, Townsend-Ingram said she immediately became involved in community service, joining the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. There, she won a community service award for helping raise money to contribute to Sojourners Women’s Shelter.
Life and career change
After college, Townsend-Ingram moved to the West Virginia state capital, Charleston. But making a living was difficult, she said.
“When I graduated college in 1993, I began working for the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources. We were called economic services workers,” she said. “I was barely making above the minimum required to obtain food stamps.”
Townsend-Ingram realized “so much was broken in the system” — particularly when the person responsible for helping people make ends meet was having trouble doing the same.
Her caseloads were massive, and she often found she couldn’t help the people she wanted to help.
“They were always eligible based on their condition, but sometimes, financially, they weren’t eligible because they fell through a crack,” she said.
One case in particular pushed her to reevaluate her life and career.
“One day, a 6-month-old baby came in with vaginal warts. I completely broke down. I had to go home for the day,” Townsend-Ingram said. “That’s when I decided that I was moving out of West Virginia to pursue a career otherwise. I wanted to do something else.”
Move to North Carolina
In 1997, she moved to North Carolina to work as a call center manager, which provided an anonymous hotline for workers to report financial malfeasance.
She made more money in North Carolina compared to her home state, but income for service-oriented jobs was still low, even after obtaining a master’s degree in business administration.
“There are times when I’ve had to benefit from county services here in Mecklenburg County, so I can definitely relate,” Townsend-Ingram said.
As her life and career grew, so did Townsend-Ingram’s affirmation that she wanted to continue service work.
Career turning point
A major turning point in her career, she said, was working in a Charlotte-Mecklenburg high school as a business teacher, where she saw issues facing students and teachers up close.
Students were “embedded” with trauma, she said. Teachers served as social workers, too.
“Even though that’s not their job, and not their skill set,” she said. “So in addition to money out of their pocket, they’re pouring heavily emotionally to support our young people in schools, and that’s what a lot of people don’t understand.”
The pieces behind Townsend-Ingram’s decision to run for the Board of County Commissioners began to fall into place as she also became more involved in politics directly. She began canvassing for candidates, including in Barack Obama’s first presidential run, as well as former Mayor Patrick Cannon’s first campaign.
Political involvement grows
Her network and relationships in politics expanded, and she became more involved. Townsend-Ingram said she “really caught the fever” when working on Justin Harlow’s City Council campaign for District 2 in 2017.
She went on to manage Emmitt Terrell Butts’s campaign when he ran for school board, and state Sen. Joyce Waddell, a Mecklenburg Democrat Townsend-Ingram said serves as her mentor.
Working with Waddell “strengthened my knowledge of campaigns, of how government operated, and what truly you needed to focus on, like the issues more so than political party,” Townsend-Ingram said.
Waddell also encouraged Townsend-Ingram to run for the Board of County Commissioners.
“She knew what my skill set was, she knew how good I was with numbers and data and things of that nature,” Townsend-Ingram said.
2022 and 2024 county commissioner elections
In 2022, Townsend-Ingram made her first run for an at-large seat on the Board of County Commissioners. She came in fourth out of six.
“But I beat someone who had raised a whole lot more money than me, so I think that’s when the community took notice and said, ‘OK, she can do this. She’s up for this,’” she said.
This year, Townsend-Ingram and her opponents, incumbents Arthur Griffin, Leigh Altman, Cotham, as well as fellow challenger Blake Van Leer, all pointed to a range of topics as being the biggest issues facing Mecklenburg County.
Griffin homed in on the “disappearing” middle class, while Altman focused on the county’s public transit system and expanding the light rail and bus service. Cotham pointed to accommodating the county’s growing population. Van Leer looked at topics like job creation and maintaining public parks.
Townsend-Ingram focused on issues such as education and housing, as well as food security and reducing gun violence.
“I say often that we cannot solve for any of these challenges, and certainly not maintain solutions, if we work separately,” Townsend-Ingram said in an Observer questionnaire ahead of the primary. “Our government entities work independent of the other too often and place all the responsibility on one agency. That must change.”
And now that she’s secured her place on the board, she’s looking forward to tackling these issues. One of her priorities is communicating services the county offers to residents.
“I had no idea the number of services. Even still, there’s some that I just am not familiar with because there are just so many,” Townsend-Ingram said. “There are so many services that are out there that the county hosts or sponsors that can help families.”
She also wants to help create pipelines for succession, so that there are more qualified candidates to run for office in the future.
“The community is now trusting me and I have huge shoes to fill. Huge,” she said. “It’s critically important to me to do succession planning, to build a mentoring program that will lead young people so that they can hit the ground running when they get elected for office.”
Townsend-Ingram said she also wants people to pay close attention and hold her accountable.
“If there’s something that’s needed, you see that I’m not doing, I will either try to incorporate that or I’ll tell you why I can’t,” she said.
