Fresh Fridays

This month’s Fresh Fridays featured an insightful conversation on the future of community development, economic mobility, and affordable housing in Rhode Island amid a shifting federal landscape. In a one-on-one conversation, United Way of Rhode Island President & CEO, Cortney Nicolato, interviewed One Neighborhood Builders’ new President & CEO, Peter Chapman, to discuss the key issues shaping their organization’s work.

This month’s Fresh Fridays webinar focused on the importance and challenges of home repair programs. The discussion centered around maintaining the affordability and safety of homes, particularly for low-income homeowners, and how these repair programs fit into broader housing strategies.

This month, Fresh Fridays considered how shared ownership of resources help make local communities more economically equitable. Community wealth building is a model for communities to directly own and control their resources. Recognizing that many common economic development models do not work for many communities, community wealth building incorporates worker cooperatives, community land trusts, housing cooperatives, public banking, and other tools to strengthen local economies. 

This month’s Fresh Friday featured a group of panelists discussing the important topic of adaptive reuse and affordable housing development. Throughout New England and the US, there are publicly- and privately-owned buildings that no longer serve their original use – mills, churches, school buildings, and much more. As communities work to address the housing crisis, they are increasingly looking to these existing assets as potential affordable housing.  

This month’s Fresh Friday session brought together a panel of experts to discuss the critical topic of accessibility and inclusion in community engagement with a specific focus on disability justice and multilingual spaces in community meetings

This weeks Fresh Friday outlines the current landscape and challenges of the housing and homelessness crisis. Our panelist discuss policy, data collection and collaboration within housing and homeless systems

This month’s Fresh Friday featured practitioners who are advancing code enforcement reforms in Rhode Island and a discussion that considered strategies that can make code enforcement more equitable and effective at improving housing quality and stability.

The discussion explored tools and strategies that allow communities to move toward “having it all”—conserving land and open space, preserving farms, developing affordable housing, creating green spaces for recreation, and more.

The discussion focused on the many challenges developers face when constructing and financing affordable housing in Rhode Island and throughout the country, including land acquisition, environmental remediation, construction costs, design requirements, and development timelines.