Christian “Cece” Worley

Christian “Cece” Worley was born just outside Atlanta, Georgia, and was raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Her family faced poverty and periods of homelessness during her childhood, and that early experience of economic instability shaped everything that came after. From a young age she understood that access to opportunity in America is not evenly distributed, and that the difference often comes down to wealth a family was either able to build or was prevented from building.

Worley earned a Bachelor of Arts in Criminology with a minor in Sociology from the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2020. It was during her studies at UNCW that a pivotal realization took hold. The hardship she had lived through was not unique to her family. Her coursework revealed that poverty and housing instability are widespread and deeply rooted within Black communities across the country, the predictable result of generations of economic exclusion rather than individual failure. That insight became the foundation of her life's work.

In the summer of 2020, Worley founded Economic Justice for African Americans to advance economic power, expand policy access, and build the knowledge and tools that Black communities have too often been denied. In 2021 she traced her own lineage to ancestors who were enslaved on a plantation in Columbus County, North Carolina, and met with a descendant of the slave-owning family to walk that land together. The work of understanding where she came from became fuel for the work of changing where her community is going.

Worley began her public service career with the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, where she graduated valedictorian of her Juvenile Justice Basic Training class. Having lived with severe endometriosis since the age of twelve, she requested a reasonable accommodation to manage her condition after a 2022 hospitalization.

The request was denied. She left the agency rather than stay silent, and in the aftermath of losing that job she once again experienced homelessness as an adult in 2022, this time understanding firsthand how quickly economic security can disappear for those without a cushion of generational wealth to fall back on.

Rather than accept that outcome, she challenged it. After multiple attorneys turned her away, Worley filed a federal civil rights lawsuit representing herself. She defeated the state's motion to dismiss, won hard-fought discovery battles, and secured a landmark 2025 ruling recognizing endometriosis as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the first decision of its kind in North Carolina. The case settled that year with monetary relief and a commitment to statewide ADA training, creating protection for countless others.

She continued building throughout. Worley earned a Master of Public Administration from North Carolina Central University in 2024, graduating summa cum laude. That same year she was named one of ten Marshall–Motley Scholars nationwide, a full scholarship awarded to future civil rights lawyers who commit to practicing in the South. She is now a student at Georgetown University Law Center, focused on civil rights and economic justice.

Her path through public administration and the law was never a detour from EJAA's mission. It was preparation for it. Christian Worley leads EJAA with the exact tools the work requires and the lived conviction that makes it personal. She fights for economic justice for African Americans because she has lived the cost of its absence, and because she knows her family's story is one that millions of Black families share.