The Mother Who Uses Personal Trauma as Fuel to Improve Her Community
- Feb 17, 2025
- 4 min read
Even after her daughters' death, Schyla Pondexter-Moore continues to fight for the rights of other residents living in DC’s public housing communities to give other children and young adults hope.
WASHINGTON – The mother of four, having just got off work minutes before, answered her phone with as much enthusiasm as if she had spent the day off. Schyla Pondexter-Moore, 46, a DC native and mother-of-four, said she is always willing to talk about the issues plaguing her community and public housing.
“There has sometimes been a struggle between being on the frontlines of community activism and being just as active as a parent. There’s no separating the two. Our children are our community,” she said.
She divorced her husband because he could not see the importance of her work as a lead community organizer with Empower DC. The organization fights racial, social, economic, and environmental injustice for DC’s lowest-income residents and communities. She said he would say things like, “You care more about the community than you care about your own kids.”
That assertion was not valid.
Her children are why she fights to protect her community as she does. She immediately acts when she notices an issue that impacts her children and other children in her community.
“As a mother, if you’re going to fight for something, always fight for your kids,” she explains.
On June 13, 2021, Ms. Pondexter-Moore lost her daughter, Cairo, to a fentanyl overdose at age 20. The unexpected loss was, and still is, devastating. When she found out another mother, Shakita McBroom, was also suffering from the loss of her 17-year-old daughter, Jayla, just nine days apart from Cairo’s, she turned her grief, as she has done before, into a chance to heal her community by rallying against DC’s opioid crisis with other grieving community members during that time. Both young women were buried on the same day, blocks away from each other.
“That is how [Schyla] handles things. Even when she is going through something, she still puts other people first, so they don’t have to go through what she went through alone,” said her cousin, Gwenita Pearson, who also lost her son, Brandon, 28, in a car accident in October that same year. “Having lost her daughter a few months before I lost my son, she wanted me to know that I could lean on her for support,” she adds.
Neighbors had seen Ms. Pondexter-Moore as a housing advocate for Highland Dwellings, located in Southeast DC, since 2010, when whispers began permeating throughout the public housing community about renovations that would force current residents out by changing the re-entry criteria after the remodel.
She began organizing her neighbors against the DC Housing Authority (DCHA) and formed a Highland Together We Stand group. In November 2012, her group partnered with the non-profit organization Neighborhood Legal Services to receive pro bono work from law firm Weil, Gotshal, and Manges to successfully sue DCHA so that Highland Dwellings residents can return home and that the community remains public housing for the next 40 years.
“This was a huge win. DC Housing Authority was not happy about it, but displacing families is not, and will never be, the answer,” she said.
Because of her previous success in fighting for public housing rights, neighbors had no problem coming to her with concerns when 80 newly installed dome-shaped cameras began appearing on top of their homes in August 2017. She became curious about the purpose of the cameras and wanted to know more about their purpose and capabilities.
“We wanted to know who was watching us and why we were being watched,” she said. “The cameras are pointed at our windows, and if we don’t close our blinds, they can see into our houses,” she explained.
She received no response from DCHA or their leasing office in response to her concerns.
She was barred from attending DCHA meetings for 60 days for demanding answers about the cameras. Not one to give up, Ms. Pondexter-Moore partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to have the ban lifted.
On Jan. 31, 2018, days after filing a grievance against having the cameras installed without explanation, DCHA contractors returned to install the camera on her house and related equipment inside her home again.
When she told the contractors to stop drilling on her house, a nearby DCHA police officer came out from behind a trash can and told her to let the workers continue the installation. When she refused, she says was shoved and pinned to the ground. Her then 22-year-old son came to get the officer off his mother after hearing her cries from inside the house.
Both were arrested in front of their neighbors, some they had known since they moved into the neighborhood 11 years earlier. Though the DCHA police department dropped the charges, when Ms. Pondexter-Moore and her son returned home from an overnight stay in jail, the camera and related equipment were already installed.
Friend and Black Lives Matter DC (BLMDC) organizer April Goggans, knew Ms. Pondexter-Moore from collaborating with Empower DC over public housing issues since 2016.
“I remember when she told me what happened, it was such a horrible thing to go through, but [Schyla] has always been able to turn her negative experiences like that into situations that benefit other people,” Goggans recalled.
On Dec. 12, 2022, Ms. Pondexter-Moore partnered with the Georgetown Law Civil Rights Clinic to file a lawsuit against DCHA for compensatory damages and to have the cameras removed due to an “unconstitutional level of surveillance,” the suit states.
“Just because we are in public housing doesn’t mean we don’t have any rights and that we should have to be watched like animals in a zoo,” Pondexter-Moore states. “I want our children to feel like they can do anything, and if they don’t like something, they can fight to change it.”
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