"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."

Sherry Shannon knows what it's like to be isolated – not just the kind of isolation where you're alone in a space, but the kind where you withdraw, where you shut down, where you don't talk to anybody. That's what happened to her when she was homeless, she says. After she found help and an apartment with Aeon, a NeighborWorks organization in Minnesota, it still took time before she started to open up.

CommonBond Communities in St. Paul, Minnesota, works with communities in Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota and Wisconsin.  Right now, organization leaders say, many of the neighbors who live in those communities are struggling.

Sometimes the thing you really need is breathing room, says Malcom Yeung, executive director of Chinatown Community Development Corporation. His organization got a bit of that through funding from NeighborWorks America, in partnership with the Wells Fargo Foundation. Grants from NeighborWorks America's Critical Relief Fund and Rental Resilience Fund allowed staff to focus on their work and on their residents. 

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.

In Texas, Foundation Communities, a NeighborWorks organization, is working hard to keep residents housed with the help of an emergency fund. So far, they've helped more than 700 residents with rental assistance. A grant from NeighborWorks America, in partnership with the Wells Fargo Foundation, made a difference. 

Just before COVID-19 hit, and with it, the stay-at-home orders, Dora Kellogg was in a car accident. Her car was totaled, she says. She had pain on her right side. She had pain on her left side. Kellogg also has asthma and heart disease. The combination prompted her doctor to insist that she stay home from her daily job.

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. 

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.

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.