News Coverage

April 2020 — ONE Neighborhood Builders is proud to announce the addition of three new members to its board of directors.  The Providence-based community development organization builds affordable housing and addresses issues of health equity throughout the state. The organization relies on its board to guide these efforts and ensure community voices are represented. New director Raysa Marte is a Silver Lake resident and former board member of Olneyville Housing Corporation, ONE|NB’s predecessor. She is a health data analyst at Lifespan and has lived in the Central Providence area for over twenty years. Raysa is dedicated to working with and…

Interview by Mary Macdonald at Providence Business News – March 25, 2020 Jennifer Hawkins is the executive director of ONE Neighborhood Builders in Providence. She spoke to the Providence Business News about the upcoming lottery for net-zero and passive-house homes that will be sold in the Olneyville neighborhood. The homes will be sold at prices starting at $140,000. The application period for the first homes should be opened in about a week. PBN: Remind our readers, what is available? HAWKINS: Five passive-certified, zero-energy homes. They are small. The average square footage is 725 square feet. They achieve zero energy because they’re…

Haley Hardwick Witman ONE Neighborhood Builders Providence, R.I. ONE Neighborhood Builders’ Haley Hardwick Witman was featured in the AIA-RI chapter’s monthly newsletter for March. Below is a bio of Haley from the Enterprise website. Enterprise sponsors the Rose Fellows program, which was highlighted in the AIA-RI newsletter. The progressive strides in sustainable design, both socially and environmentally, are encouraging to Haley as an idealist seeking to change the way in which people inhabit the world. She believes that it is critical to the success of a project that the existing community is involved and heard from the very beginning stages…

March 9, 2020 On Thursday, March 5, TD Charitable Foundation announced that ONE Neighborhood Builders of Providence, RI, was awarded a grant of $125,000 in support of its work around affordable housing, making it the only organization in Rhode Island to receive this funding. “ONE Neighborhood Builders is deeply grateful to TD Charitable Foundation for its support of our work to improve home, health, and safety for our neighbors,” said Jennifer Hawkins, executive director, ONE Neighborhood Builders. In total, TD Charitable Foundation, the charitable giving arm of TD Bank, awarded 30 affordable housing development organizations from Maine to Florida a…

By Jessica David for the Rhode Island Foundation’s Winter 2020 Magazine.   “Oh, this is my lucky day,” thought Ana Jimenez. Ana, her husband Freddy, and their three children were living in a small two-bedroom apartment when she saw men rehabbing a two-family home in her Olneyville neighborhood in early 2018. “I asked the guy who was fixing the house if they were going to rent it,” Ana recalls. He directed her to ONE Neighborhood Builders (ONE|NB), a nonprofit community development organization that works to revitalize Providence neighborhoods. Ana followed up with them and learned about their P3 (Protecting Providence Properties)…

Published by Chris Barnett, Rhode Island Foundation on January 3rd, 2020.  Thanks to the generosity of local donors, the Rhode Island Census 2020 Fund has awarded nearly $300,000 to local organizations for outreach and education that will encourage participation in the 2020 Census. The goal is to protect the roughly $3.8 billion a year that Rhode Island receives in federal funding for education, health care, housing and more based on Census data. “These Census outreach grants are an essential tool to build the grassroots effort that will help us achieve our goal of ensuring that every Rhode Islander is counted,”…

Published by Energy News Network — November 18th, 2019 Developers of five new Providence homes aim to reduce residents’ long-term costs by eliminating their utility bills. Residents of an affordable housing development under construction in Providence, Rhode Island, will get more than a break on the home price — they will have zero energy bills. Five two-bedroom homes are being built to net-zero energy standards on a 0.75-acre lot in the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of Olneyville. The two-level, 750-square-foot homes will be equipped with enough rooftop solar panels to supply slightly more energy than they are expected to consume. The…

Published in The Providence Journal  – October 28, 2019 PROVIDENCE — A new housing development in Providence will simultaneously address three key issues — affordability, climate change and workforce development — officials say, while also providing housing for five families. On Monday, officials broke ground on the Sheridan Small Homes project, a community of five compact, affordable, zero-emissions homes being developed by One Neighborhood Builders, a community development nonprofit based in Olneyville. “While modest in scale … this project is large in innovation,” said One Neighborhood Builders Executive Director Jennifer Hawkins, as she stood at the project site — a…