MEMPHIS, Tenn. — If you’ve ever lost a loved one, you know burying them is expensive.
But a Raleigh man hopes to change that.
“When we make money from the cemetery, we are putting it back in the community,” Kenneth Bohanna Sr. said.
Bohanna Sr. bought land in Raleigh and turned it the Raleigh Frayser Community Center to give back.
“I was inspired to say, ‘Instead of building something, let’s do a cemetery and help families, because the death rate is so high,” he said.
Burying people for little or nothing, that’s Bohanna Sr.’s vision.
“So many families are insurance poor. They have no insurance at all,” he said.
To make sure families won’t have to create a GoFundMe account or go into debt after losing someone, Bohanna Sr. made sure there’s a place for struggling families to hold their funeral if needed.
“We’ve got 17 acres here and another 18 down the street,” but he’s not stopping there.
Bohanna plans on buying abandoned homes in Raleigh, saying he wants the blight gone.
“Somebody has thrown some tires out here.”
He rolled up his own sleeves and started cleaning up after getting tired of calling 311.
“We sometimes have to do it ourselves.”
“Bohanna Sr. says he is tired of relying on the city to fix his neighborhood, but we reached out to the city to let them know what we saw out here.