Housing and community developers came together this week for the NeighborWorks Training Institute (NTI) in Los Angeles.

In Texas, two kids have their own rooms for the very first time. In Alaska, a couple is able to open their home to friends. In Minnesota, a chef is glad to finally have a place of her own.

The new year is a time when people often look ahead. They talk about their hopes, their resolutions, the things they want to achieve in the coming 365 days. On the cusp of the new year, we asked NeighborWorks America's senior vice presidents to share some of their hopes and wishes for 2022. 

When she needs inspiration, Chrystel Cornelius looks to her grandmother. A member of the tribal nation of The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, Mary Cornelius was the victim of assimilation, sent to boarding school to learn to be someone else's idea of "American."But after she graduated, she became a founder of the American Indian Movement, a civil rights organization.

Shirley Sherrod is a familiar name to those who know about community land trusts (CLTs), entities where a nonprofit corporation owns the land, keeping it affordable, while community members own the homes that rest upon it. Sherrod, who is speaking Wednesday, Feb.

Closing the homeownership gap won't happen overnight. But working to preserve affordable housing and collaborating with partners can make a difference, said Susan M. Ifill, executive vice president and chief operating officer for NeighborWorks America. Ifill spoke on a panel, Narrowing the Homeownership Gap, in December, alongside leaders from Fifth Third Bank at the Black and Latino Summit, which the National Minority Community Investment Co-operative hosted.

The gap between Black and white homeownership widened this year, according Harvard's annual housing study, released last week from the university's Joint Center for Housing Studies. A panel moderated by the Wall Street Journal's Nicole Friedman convened to talk about the findings and implications of the report.

"We must, as a country, keep the pathways of property ownership and homeownership open," NeighborWorks President and CEO Marietta Rodriguez said during a panel at the National Fair Housing Alliance's 2020 conference. Rodriguez said it's particularly important to keep those pathways open to people of color and to communities that have been disenfranchised."In this country, the ownership of land gives the property owner power and a voice that a non-property owner doesn't have.