Her first move was to incorporate and then take steps toward obtaining nonprofit status and, eventually, funding. The AACHAF grant was one of the first grants she applied for. “It gave us the momentum we needed,” she says. Concurrently, she worked her various networks, canvassing and brainstorming. “I contacted people—the surrounding neighbors, spoke to my sisters, started reaching out to people who loved my mom’s work.”
As it turned out, some of the reverse also happened. Poets and others who were enamored by her mother’s work reached out to her. Like Janelle Hughes, a former journalist who had remade herself into an interior designer. Hughes knew of Lucille Clifton’s legacy and stumbled onto Sidney’s passion project online. “I’d started following Sidney on social media and saw her interest in revamping the space,” says Hughes. “I cold-emailed her expressing interest and curiosity: ‘What are your goals?’ That was kind of the start of it.” They set up a call and Hughes told Sidney about her then-Baltimore-based design firm, co-owned at the time with designer Kim R. Williams. “I said, ‘If you ever need interior design support, I would love to work on this project.’” The three women ended up inking a deal.
Each room, each passageway, informed Sidney and the designers of what they needed to be: “[Much of the space] is tied to its original purpose,” she explains. “The living room, where people gathered, that’s where we have gatherings now, where we have readings. The dining room, where my mom wrote, tends to be where we hold workshops. The second floor has the Lucille Clifton Suite, which will [host] resident artists and writers in what used to be ‘Mommy and Daddy’s’ room.” The house’s first public event, held in March 2024, featured award-winning writers Aaliyah Bilal and Safiya Sinclair in conversation. Other programs over the past year have included a six-week poetry workshop and a ceramics workshop for children.
Working on the larger rehabilitation project meant confronting changes the latter owners had made to the house’s floor plan. The designers restored most of the original footprint. They were sensitive to the need to merge the original early 1900s feel with what it would have been like to inhabit the space in the late 1960s and ’70s. For example, they used checkerboard flooring in the kitchen to meet both goals. “We really wanted to honor and execute Sidney’s vision,” says Hughes.
