At Avenue CDC in Houston, Texas, as in other places across the United states, everything changed overnight. As COVID-19 spread, employees went from working in an office to working at home, from building strong homes and communities to feeding those communities, too.

Each year, Americans observe National Hispanic Heritage Month. From September 15 to October 15, they celebrate the histories, cultures and contributions of American citizens whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America.

When she first started working as a homebuying educator in 2006, "it was a buyer's boom," says Gabriela Luna, now an educator and housing counselor at Tejano Center for Community Concerns in Houston, Texas. "Everyone was buying. There was so much support from all banks."
 

A new deck for a retired veteran. An overgrown yard, weeded and tamed. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, NeighborWorks Green Bay is joining with Neighborhood Associations and the city to work on these projects and more. It's part of their Good Neighbor Week, held Sept. 21 to 27, the week leading up to National Good Neighbor Day. 

NeighborWorks President and CEO Marietta Rodriguez spoke with the National Credit Union Administration on Sept. 15 to help educate credit unions about NeighborWorks and about the potential for future partnerships. "We are very focused on local communities," she explained, and on generating the highest impact.
 

Elizabeth Alonzo-Villarreal works with a staff of eight at NeighborWorks Laredo, where she serves as CEO. But together, the staff helps about 1,000 others each year. So when the staff switched from working in a central office to working from home at the start of COVID-19, the organization utilized grants from NeighborWorks America to help things run more smoothly as they continued to provide homebuyer education, financial capability training and foreclosure prevention counseling.

Training isn't just a way to keep certifications current; it's a way to keep knowledge current. And as current events continue to create moving targets for affordable housing and community development professionals – with eviction moratoriums, unemployment, rental relief, and a kaleidoscope of grants and programs – housing counselors, educators and trainers need to keep up.

Isileli Tausinga says people often wonder: Why leave a beautiful island to come to the desert in Utah? His answer? Education, religion and opportunity.

In January, Darryl Smith became CEO of HomeSight in Southeast Seattle, the most diverse part of the city. When COVID-19 hit the United States, Washington was the first to be listed as a hotspot. There have been more than 25,000 cases of coronavirus confirmed in the state, and more than a thousand deaths. About half of those have been in King County, named for Martin Luther King, Jr., the county where Seattle is located.