Organizations

The National Community Stabilization Trust’s “First Look” program will serve as the “engine” for a new national HUD First Look program. The program will give NSP grantees, literally, the first look at REO properties before they come on the market, creating an efficient process for grantees to strategically acquire properties that will advance neighborhood stabilization. Participating financial institutions include Bank of America, Citi, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, GMAC, JPMorgan Chase, Nationstar, and Wells Fargo, as well as specialty servicers such as Ocwen and Saxon.

Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta announced in August that Self-Help Ventures Fund, a financing affiliate of the Center for Community Self-Help, has become the Bank’s first Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) loan fund member, and the first CDFI-affiliated organization to join a Federal Home Loan Bank. In January 2010, the Federal Housing Finance Agency implemented provisions of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 that permitted qualifying CDFIs to become members of a Federal Home Loan Bank.

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) has been awarded $4.2 million under the first round of awards from the new federal Social Innovation Fund, a grant program administered through the Corporation for National and Community Service focused on supporting replicable, innovative nonprofit solutions in areas including economic opportunity. The grant will support new and expanded LISC Financial Opportunity Centers in Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Duluth, Houston, Indianapolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, San Diego, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

In late July, Enterprise Community Partners hosted the first ever Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute, which brought together nonprofit affordable housing developers with leading architects to work through specific outstanding design issues in actual projects currently in the design phase, with a goal of maximizing sustainability, affordability, and livability. The institute was funded by the McKnight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Federal Home Loan Banks, Minnesota Housing Finance Agency, and the Kendeda Fund.

National Alliance of Community Economic Development Associations and Root Change awarded their final Managing Neighborhood Change Competition award, in the building markets and ensuring equitable revitalization category, to the Indiana Association for Community Economic Development’s Unsung Indy initiative, a marketing campaign designed to raise awareness of and increase investment in near-in urban neighborhoods in Indianapolis. Previous awards had gone to the Philadelphia Association of CDCs’ Pocket Neighborhood Inventory System, Thai CDC’s Hollywood Human Development Overlay District Survey Results, and the Woman’s Community Revitalization Project’s Public Land Listening Project in the data category and Open Indicators Consortium’s WEAVE: Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment in the diagnostic tools category.

People

In May, Darren Walker joined the Ford Foundation as vice president for education, creativity, and free expression, one of Ford’s three major program areas. Walker succeeds Alison R. Bernstein, who retired from the position after 14 years. Walker will guide more than $150 million in annual grant making and serve as an officer of the board of trustees. Previously, Walker was vice president for foundation initiatives at The Rockefeller Foundation. Before joining Rockefeller in 2002, he served as chief operating officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation in New York City.

Eric Hodderson has retired after 20 years at the helm of Cleveland’s Neighborhood Progress, Inc., a foundation-funded community development intermediary that has recently been taking a lead role in combating the effects of foreclosure and vacant properties. Before coming to NPI he was the director of the Union Miles Community Congress, a Cleveland community-based organizing and development group.

Shari Berenbach has stepped down from her role as president and CEO of the Calvert Foundation after 13 years in that role. She will be succeeded in the interim by Lisa Hall, the foundation’s executive vice president and chief lending officer. Berenbach is leaving Calvert to lead microenterprise development at USAID.

Tahirih Ziegler is the new executive director of Detroit LISC. Ziegler has been with LISC for many years, serving as a program officer and then executive director for Michigan LISC, and assistant program officer for Kalamazoo LISC. Her previous professional experience includes working as a project manager with Kalamazoo Neighborhood Housing Services, project director for the Women’s Survival Center of Oakland County, and executive director of the Waterford Cultural Council.

Greg Nickels, who served as mayor of Seattle from 2002 to 2009, has been named a distinguished urban fellow of Living Cities, an urban-focused philanthropic collaborative of 22 of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions. Nickels will work closely with Living Cities to shape the organization’s expanded agenda of helping America’s cities lay the foundation for a new green economy that includes expanding opportunities for low-income people.

Steven Adamske, the top spokesman for Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has assumed a new role handling public affairs for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Adamske, who served as Frank’s communications director through the 2008 financial crisis and the effort to overhaul financial regulation, replaces Andrew Williams, the former Treasury deputy assistant secretary for public affairs.