Print pageRelease date: 6/24/2024
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NeighborWorks America celebrates resident leaders with prestigious award
The Dorothy Richardson Award for Resident Leadership recognizes leaders who bring neighbors together for improvements, change
Washington, D.C. — NeighborWorks America honors seven resident leaders with its 2024 Dorothy Richardson Award for Resident Leadership. The seven honorees, who come from across the country, inspire their neighbors and lead their neighborhoods in promoting improvements and change, in preserving neighborhood culture, and in ensuring their communities are safe and healthy places to call home. The awards will be presented in a ceremony on Nov. 1 during NeighborWorks America’s Community Leadership Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. This is an especially significant event, as this year marks NeighborWorks America’s 45th anniversary.
"Our Dorothy Richardson Award for Resident Leadership honors community leaders who represent the very best of our communities – the very best of all of us,” said Marietta Rodriguez, NeighborWorks America’s President & CEO. “I admire them and am inspired by the work they do – not just today but all year long, because these leaders are a true testament of the human spirit. When facing challenges, they leaned in to make positive change for their communities.”
2024 Award Honorees
Leslie Radcliffe (New Haven, Connecticut, nominated by Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven) makes her neighborhood more beautiful and her neighbors healthier and safer. Radcliffe sees her neighbors as family and aims to improve their lives through her grassroots efforts. She brings together businesses, organizations and city officials to take on community challenges, making sure residents feel like they have a voice. That includes making sure they can engage in civic processes, participate in meetings and more. And she provides a safe place for them to do it, founding spaces such as the Truman Street Community Garden, which provides both food for the community and a space to heal.
Monica Underwood and Theresa Davis (Brooklyn, New York, nominated by Fifth Avenue Committee) advocated for the needs of residents in public housing in South Brooklyn. Their campaigns improved the lives of residents through everything from food distribution to clean-up to engaging residents in civic life. From serving on boards and committees to helping Fifth Avenue Committee, they have fought to make sure homes are safer through repairs, mold remediation, roof replacement and more. They also won big investments from the city to revitalize their public housing and to address cleanup from the Gowanus Canal and former Manufactured Gas Plant sites. And they partnered with others to bring an exhibit that teaches residents about redlining in America.
Arica Gonzalez (Baltimore, Maryland, nominated by NHS of Baltimore) worked to build Urban Oasis in a spot that had once been filled with blight. Gonzalez’s tireless vision led to turning a space that had once looked out on collapsing garages and drug use to a beautified gated alleyway; an overgrown lot became a performance space with community popups. As the neighborhood went from blight to beauty, neighbors engaged with them, and Gonzalez started Urban Oasis as a nonprofit that envisions many more things to come.
Elnora Jefferson (Kansas City, Kansas, nominated by Community Housing of Wyandotte County) dedicated decades to mentorship and leadership. “Mother Jefferson,” as she is known in the community, championed neighborhood planning. Her memory, which runs long and deep, has kept her neighborhood on track through discussions with county commissioners about landbank policy. She has pushed for greater transparency and informed citizen input – and gotten both while also addressing employment and health issues for her community.
Erica Ledesma and Niria Alicia Garcia (Talent, Oregon, nominated by CASA of Oregon) worked in the aftermath of the Almeda fire to fight for an equitable recovery for displaced residents. Their work, which resulted in a nonprofit called Coalición Fortaleza, includes the rebuilding of a mobile home park where residents lost everything, now a resident-owned community that will see residents later this summer, and 34 units of housing for agriculture farmworkers.
Resident leaders like this year’s honorees serve their communities by generating positive change. They live in the communities, and thus know what the communities need. NeighborWorks America has been honoring leaders with this award since 1992, but it has celebrated leaders for decades. The award comes from NeighborWorks America’s own founding, which dates back to the 1960s in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where a Black homeowner named Dorothy Mae Richardson, along with her neighbors, brought in bankers, public officials and more to gather around a table to address the history of redlining and disinvestment in their community. Richardson and her neighbors had no formal training in community engagement. But in their honor, NeighborWorks provides training and development opportunities for residents to focus on challenges in their communities, and on solutions to those challenges. Learn about past honorees at Dorothy Richardson Awards for Resident Leadership.
About NeighborWorks America
Celebrating 45 years, Neighborhood Reinvestment Corp., a national, nonpartisan nonprofit known as NeighborWorks America, has strived to make every community a place of opportunity. Our network of excellence includes nearly 250 nonprofits in every state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and on Native lands. NeighborWorks offers grant funding, peer exchange, technical assistance, evaluation tools and access to best-in-class training as the nation’s leading trainer of housing and community development professionals. NeighborWorks network organizations provide residents in their communities with affordable homes, owned and rented; financial counseling and coaching; community building through resident engagement; and collaboration in the areas of health, employment and education.
