For Providence Community Housing, helping people return home has always been central to its mission. 

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.