Rose Espinoza grew up in the Corona Camp neighborhood of La Habra in Orange County, California. When NeighborWorks Housing Services constructed new houses on her old street in the early 1990s, she bought one. Her purchase was built, in part, on the good memories of her childhood, like her mother sewing costumes for participants of the Our Lady of Guadalupe Parade.  "I wanted my son to have those same memories," she says. "But when we purchased our home, things had changed."

"If there's a silver lining to the pandemic," says Daniela Ogden, Eden Housing's vice president of communications, advocacy and fund development, "it's this: Affordable housing works. Even as residents lose hours and jobs, those who live in Low-Income Housing, Tax Credit housing, or receive Section 8 or 202 housing vouchers, have remained stably housed. The programs, coupled with rent relief provided by Eden's Tenant Relief Fund, have given low-income residents one less thing to worry about."

Unprecedented. Difficult. Heartbreaking. The words that come up when people discuss 2020 are rarely positive. But as a pandemic and economic hardships spread across the United States, NeighborWorks network organizations moved quickly, created new partnerships, worked long hours and offered new services to help residents in their communities. As we begin a new calendar year, we asked a few leaders across the network to share some of their thoughts about the year we just completed, and about the year ahead.

It's not coming until just after Christmas, but one thing that Nevada HAND senior living residents will be able to receive this month is the new COVID-19 vaccine. Staff and medical staff will receive the vaccine, too. In case there are side effects, half the staff and residents will be inoculated in December, and the other half will be inoculated two weeks later. 

Keeping the community connected is tough right now. But Alamo Community Group is always looking for new ways to do it. They're looking even more as the holidays approach. One afternoon, during a Zoom meeting, a staff member recalled the days of sending "candygrams" in school. You'd pay a dollar, and someone would deliver a candy bar across the cafeteria to a friend or crush.

On a typical weekday, Rollin Wood, executive director for the Native Partnership for Housing (NPH) might be on a Zoom conference call, where you'd expect to find an executive director in 2020 – or he might be driving down Interstate 40, with a load of construction materials for a home being built on or near the Navajo reservation in New Mexico.

There are no roads to Bethel, Alaska. That's the case for many villages that are considered "rural" in this wilderness state, and that means that housing can be complicated. For Bethel, population 6,500, the need for housing has become more critical in recent years, and a NeighborWorks organization is trying to help.

A nursery worker in Woodburn, Oregon, is grateful for the box of food, available each Wednesday since the pandemic began. A berry worker appreciates food and other supplies --"nos trajeron mascarillas y desinfectante" – helping farmworkers as they face physical and economic difficulties associated with COVID-19. 

The housing complex, still under construction in Porterville, California, will be called Nupchi Xo' Oy. The name pays tribute to Joseph Darrel Vera, who worked to bring affordable housing to members of the Tule River Tribe. Vera died just before the complex, in a city in the San Joaquin Valley near the reservation, came to fruition. His Indian nickname is Nupchi, meaning "cousin." The complex is being called "Village of the Cousins." 

At Rural Communities Housing Development Corporation (RCHDC), a NeighborWorks America organization in Northern California, tenants were struggling. About three-fourths of the organization's residents have their housing subsidized, and those subsidies are adjustable, so it wasn't so much that they needed help paying their rent during the time of COVID as it was that they needed contact – even at a distance.