Sharon Lee was born in New York and spent part of her formative years with her grandparents in Hong Kong when her parents divorced. Even at age 5, Lee, executive director of Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), reports being conscious of the wide wealth disparities that existed in the world. Each morning when she arrived at school, she passed men and women sitting outside the gate, asking for spare change.

As the pandemic began, The Primavera Foundation, Inc., in Tucson, Arizona, worked with the city and Pima County to set aside hotel rooms for people experiencing homelessness who needed to quarantine because of exposure to COVID-19 or because they had symptoms. In recent months, staff partnered with Pima County Health Department and El Rio Federally Qualified Health Care Centers to reach out to residents, people living in shelters, and those awaiting housing.

Warren Dawson has lived in one of RUPCO Inc.'s apartment communities in Kingston, New York, for three years. Before that, he was homeless for some time in South Carolina, he says. He stayed in shelters and in parks. He eventually went north to New York for a funeral and decided to stay to be closer to family. That's when he entered a shelter program for veterans, qualifying through his service in the National Guard and the U.S. Army.

Preeya Subedi has always had an interest in public health. Next year, she plans to go to medical school to start her studies, with a goal of becoming a doctor. But between graduating from the University of Maryland and beginning medical school, she wanted a job that would remind her of the needs of the people she'll eventually help as a doctor. 

The letter was written by hand on lined paper. On those lines – and between them – was gratitude from a tenant trying to rebuild her life after an abusive marriage. She had come to the transitional townhomes at Mennonite Housing Rehabilitation Services, Inc., in Kansas with her three children. But the progress she had made in rebuilding her life seemed to come to a halt when COVID-19 took away her employment. 

Maria Garciaz came to NeighborWorks Salt Lake as a volunteer. She’d been working in juvenile court as a probation officer, sometimes with gang members, and the organization asked her to offer advice on a youth program to help teens build life skills. “I fell in love with the work,” she says. When YouthWorks finally came into being, she submitted an application to head the program. That was her path to community organizing.
 

Leslie Reid was born into a family of two: It was her and her mother, alone in New York, in need of better prospects. Reid spent time in foster care while her mother went to find them a home. Her family grew exponentially when she rejoined her mother, who had found work in Boston with a community of social workers. They'd started an organization for homeless youth, Reid says, and they lived together and worked together, providing shelter and services. 

The residents who live in Lee House, a senior apartment building owned and operated by the Housing Assistance Program of Essex County (HAPEC), take care of each other. The building, an historic Port Henry hotel in Elizabethtown, New York, converted to affordable housing, has 25 residents who make sure their neighbors make it to doctor’s appointments or to the grocery store to pick up food or an extra container of wipes.

Angela Bannerman Ankoma wanted her mother to have peppers, yams, and other foods she missed from her native Ghana. A 30-year resident of the densely populated, culturally diverse West End in Providence, Rhode Island, the community where she grew up, Ankoma says she knew immigrants in her community who would travel as far as New Jersey to find or sell produce and specialty items that were native to their diet. And she felt for the people in her neighborhood who just needed access healthy food that was culturally responsive.