“Food can bring us together.” For Felix Colon, this is more than just a saying; it’s an action. In North Central Massachusetts, Felix founded Meek and Humble Ministries, a nonprofit organization that cooks, delivers and serves approximately 80 hot meals three times per week to individuals and families in need. Unlike some more traditional programs, Felix loads all the meals in his truck and delivers them to people where they are. 

Olivia Gomez grew up in Planada, a small community of about 4,000 people in California’s Central Valley. Her parents picked tomatoes, peaches and figs, and she lived first in a camp for farm workers. When Self-Help Enterprises, a NeighborWorks network organization in Visalia, opened Bear Creek Housing for farm workers, she and her family moved there. Four years later, she remembers helping her parents as they built a home of their own, also through a Self-Help program.

For more than three decades, the John R. Grubb Community YMCA anchored Des Moines’ Northside. It opened in 1994 in a city-owned building at 11th Street and College Avenue, and for families in King-Irving and the surrounding neighborhoods it was one of the few reliable places where children could swim, seniors could exercise, and neighbors could simply run into one another.

Vinegar Hill, the Charlottesville community where Carmelita Wood was born, isn’t here anymore. Once a thriving neighborhood of Black-owned homes and businesses, it was razed in the 1960s, part of an urban renewal program.

NeighborWorks® America is proud to celebrate the recipients of its annual Dorothy Richardson Award for Resident Leadership. The national award honors resident leaders who strengthen their communities and inspire their neighbors to do the same.

Whitley D. English has spent her entire life in Asheville, North Carolina. It’s where she grew up, worked and raised her two children. It’s also where she survived the most traumatic experience of her life: intimate partner violence. 

She was left with two black eyes, multiple facial fractures, a missing tooth and a hospital stay. “I was left with a long road to recovery and justice,” she said.  

When the property tax bill arrives, it is more than just a number. For some residents, that envelope signals the start of impossible choices: food or housing? Medication or mortgage?