Tracee Perryman’s life today is a testament to those that came before her. 

As the CEO of the Center of Hope and Family Services, a social services organization she helped to create more than 25 years ago to improve the educational outcomes of the city’s children and families, she has devoted her life to helping others, in ways that would make her ancestors proud.   

“I come from multiple generations of people who have a passion for children and youth,” Ms. Perryman, who has her doctorate in social work from Ohio State University, said. “As far back as I can remember, my great grandfather on my father’s side migrated here from the South and then took in young families who were also migrating and helped them get established with employment and housing in addition to bringing them in to the church that he pastored.”  

Ms. Perryman, 44, said that her great-grandfather’s church was a safe place for youth where they could get things like music lessons. Many children who came through the church wound up being everything from recording artists to pastors themselves. 

“When he saw talent, he invested in it through the church. They had a very strong Christian education department as well,” Ms. Perryman, a St. Ursula Academy graduate, said.  

Conversely, she said her maternal grandfather worked in education in the 1950s and later became an entrepreneur.

“This notion of education and social entrepreneurship has been curated in my family genes since before I was thought of,” she said.     

Center of Hope Family Services started as a strictly faith based church like her great grandfather’s, and though that has changed over the years as needs pulled in different directions, the core principles have remained the same — meeting the holistic needs of children and families.

“We started with education support very early,” she said. “We also worked with local shelters to provide basic necessities. We provided meals and baskets at holiday times so that every family that wanted to celebrate would have the means to do so.” 

In the years since then, the organization has blossomed under Ms. Perryman’s leadership from having a presence predominantly in the African-American community to spreading all over the city of Toledo and its communities.  

The center now holds a lot of afterschool programs that provide supplemental education which kids do not get in school, such as in subjects like business.  

In December, the company’s offices moved from South Toledo to West Toledo off of Talmadge Road near the Franklin Park Mall with facility size greatly expanded in order to accommodate bigger groups with more students — achieving Ms. Perryman’s goal of serving 100 students per day. 

Ms. Perryman said the group, which also maintains a presence at the Lucas County Juvenile Justice Center and in some Toledo Public Schools like Robinson Elementary in central Toledo, now routinely works with Washington Local Schools. She said the principles that make her organization what it is transcend background. 

Fletcher Word, publisher and editor of the local African-American centered newspaper The Sojourner’s Truth, serves as the chairman of the board for Center of Hope and said Ms. Perryman is an organized, professional, and detail oriented leader, whose work in the community is of the utmost importance and impact.

“One thing about Tracee that I find particularly admirable is she is someone that monitors and follows up,” said Mr. Word, who has published the Truth since 2001. “Not just from a personal standpoint but from the standpoint of bringing in expertise to evaluate the impact of programs. All of that expertise has suggested from day one that the impact is certainly a positive impact that is greatly enhancing children’s opportunities to receive additional education and supplement their education.”

Mr. Word noted that Center of Hope was started from scratch and the breadth of impact has grown enormously over the years, due to strong leaders like Ms. Perryman, who preach the lesson of “do not as I say, but as I do.”

“She comes from a family that has a personal stake in what they are preaching — that is the value of education,” Mr. Word said. 

Ms. Perryman mentioned her father Donald Perryman, who has three doctorates, and her sister Staci Perryman-Clark, who also has a doctorate, as just two of the many positive role models in her life.

Though she does not take part in the day-to-day teaching of students as much as she used to, Ms. Perryman said providing a positive role model for students and others in her own life is one of the main things that she does — using principles she first saw demonstrated at a young age.  

“There is a principle we talk about as an agency called early learning influences,” she said, referencing her upbringing. “Education was highly valued. We were pushed to achieve because we were capable.” 

She said the principle was that everyone in the Perryman family should perform up to their potential and education was something that was normative, going back to the time when she was just four or five years old and her dad was working his way through college.

“There were books all over the house and highlighters,” Ms. Perryman said. “My mom would tell me that when I was four years old I would walk around talking about how I am going to college.” 

Her parents were connoisseurs of African-American art as well, and works from luminaries like Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence hanging up around her childhood home gave her even more vivid palettes on how to fashion her future. 

“The content was what was important,” Ms. Perryman said of the paintings.

Ms. Perryman mentioned Confrontation at the Bridge, a Jacob Lawrence painting which was depicts a scene from the 1965 Selma march led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and The Library, an earlier Lawrence painting that depicts people of color reading in the title location, as being particularly formative.    

“You see African Americans in leadership positions,” she said, “and groups of people trying to make progress for change.

“I learned very early on to not take things for granted. I learned that life comes with struggle, but I also saw images of educators, people being educated, leaders, musicians, artists, so the world of possibility was open to me very, very early. That led me on a path to decide what I wanted to do and to believe that what I wanted to do would be attainable.”  

First Published February 18, 2023, 1:00 p.m.