The Sustainable Business Initiative helps community-based NeighborWorks organizations strengthen their foundations and grow revenue. In 2024, the SBI provide seed grants to seven network organizations with promising earned revenue strategies. Over the next few weeks, as part of Small Business Month, NeighborWorks will highlight some of those outcomes.

NeighborWorks® America and the National NeighborWorks Association presented four awards this month during the NeighborWorks Executive Symposium.

The symposium’s theme, Collective Leadership: Building Strength for Today & Tomorrow, was evident in each recipient.

NeighborWorks® America welcomed leaders from across its nearly 250-member network to Washington, D.C., last week, for its annual Executive Symposium. The gathering gave leaders – and, for the first time in person, board members – a chance to connect, to innovate, and to talk about solutions for the nation’s housing crisis.

This year, about 220 network leaders and 120 board members joined in the event. The theme was Collective Leadership: Building Strength for Today & Tomorrow!

NeighborWorks® America convened a Housing Supply Solutions Lab last week to provide affordable housing and community development practitioners in the network a chance to dig deeply into innovative building techniques, zoning and land-use reform, and attainability and affordability. The lab format allowed the participants a chance not just to listen, but to speak, learn and solve challenges together. They left the eight-hour session with new connections and new ideas. 

This past week has much of the nation focusing on weather conditions and forecasts. At NeighborWorks® America, Chief Operating Officer Lee Anne Adams is also looking at the conditions for the housing market, as NeighborWorks and the network focus on scaling solutions for the year ahead.

The upcoming NeighborWorks® Training Institute in Chicago promises to be an incubator for ideas, innovations and energy when it opens on Feb. 23. One of the courses that has people talking is Building Legacies: Property Inheritance and Estate Planning Strategies for Housing Professionals (HO233). The course continues the conversation on how to increase generational wealth and make sure that when families or individuals do buy a home, they are able to pass that wealth on. It should be of particular interest to housing counselors.