For NeighborWorks America's recent symposium, "Co-creating an Equitable Future at the Intersection of Health, Housing and Community Development," leaders created a series of case studies to help show how network organzitions are centering resident voice. Following is the study on Little Tokyo Service Center, based in Los Angels, centering on resident co-creation through culture, history and place.

Marietta Rodriguez presented this speech at the 2024 National Interagency Community Reinvestment on March 7 as part of a session entitled “A New Landscape for Community Impact.” 

Imagine a neighborhood. ANY neighborhood. A neighborhood that you live in, a neighborhood that you grew up in or a neighborhood you've visited. 

If you were taking a country drive toward Vermont's Route 5, a highway that traces the path of the Connecticut River, you'd have to choose your direction. Would you go south toward Bellows Falls? Or drive north instead? 

When I was a kid, the center of my small, rural, Hudson Valley town featured an ice cream shop with a sticky, walk-up service window and a tiny, one-register grocery store where they carried one of practically everything. Today, the grocery is an antique store, and it sits a stone's throw from a new marketplace that peddles organic, farm-sourced products of a certain aesthetic, accordingly priced.

A Native strategy. An aspirational training plan. Listening to the network and finding the programs that will help the most. With the start of a new year, NeighborWorks leaders look at some of the plans and goals in store. 

NeighborWorks' commitment to Native communities 

Mel Willie, NeighborWorks America's director of Native American Partnerships & Strategy, says that in 2023, the national nonprofit focused on developing a five-year Native strategy. "Now we're focused on launching it."  

"Why do you do what you do?" This is the question that we posed to a few affordable housing and community development leaders in and around NeighborWorks America. 

"I work at NeighborWorks America because the work we deliver for our network and our communities improves the lives of people!" 

—Marietta Rodriguez, President & CEO, NeighborWorks America

On a street in Dover, Delaware, where drug deals once took place midday in plain view, students are now serving ice cream. Mint chocolate chip. Cookie dough. Confetti cotton candy. Kids request their flavors and sit with grandparents at The Scoop on Loockerman, a new shop that provides both dessert and community change.