An outreach team at Neighborhood Housing Services of Baltimore is working on "doorknockers" and postcards to let the community know they're ready to provide foreclosure assistance and prevention.

At Daimaru, once a hotel and more permanent housing run by Little Tokyo Service Center, residents were struggling. Many of them worked in the restaurant industry, and the pandemic hit their places of business hard. "So many closed," says Nancy Alcaraz, director of resident services. 

When a crisis strikes, NeighborWorks network organizations have tools to help. During the pandemic, one of the most visible tools was financial counseling, reports Michael Rayder, associate director of development with Maine's Avesta Housing. Individuals in Avesta's apartment rental homes lost jobs, hours and wages. "They needed to re-evaluate how they managed their budgets," Rayder says. "Financial capability was the way for us to provide services for people who were suddenly in crisis mode."

At REACH Community Development, a NeighborWorks network organization in Portland, Oregon, residents began the pandemic by controlling what they could. They wore masks and kept a proper social distance. They worked and when they couldn't, they filed for unemployment. 

At Midwest Minnesota Community Development Corporation (MMCDC), a NeighborWorks network organization in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, the COVID-19 pandemic made life more complicated. But a number of residents in the community had already been struggling, relates Laura McKnight, director of housing and real estate.

Kerri-Ann Griffith had just returned to her apartment in the Germantown neighborhood after an evening out with friends when the lights started to blink. Then the howling started. She grabbed her cat, Jaeda. "We were both screaming."

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.

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. 

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.

In November, just before Thanksgiving, ONE Neighborhood Builders paraded through the streets of their community with an announcement, posted on signs and shouted from the back of a truck. "Free WiFi," they said. And then in Spanish, "Gratis WiFi."

The announcement was for the community's new WiFi network, providing about 3,000 households in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, with free high-speed internet.