Last week, SV@Home held the third Community Roots Collaborative’s (CRC) convening of the year at SOMOS Mayfair’s headquarters in the Queztal Gardens affordable housing apartment complex! This year’s cohort came into this convening pumped from their tour of San Francisco Community Land Trust properties last month. We invited three special guests to talk about their profoundly informative and unique approaches in acquiring and rehabilitating properties with CRC cohort members, they included:
- Asn Ndiaye, Executive Director of Northern California Land Trust
- Juan Diego Castro, National Partnerships Director of Mission Economic Development Agency of San Francisco.
- Delvin Hall, Principal & Founder of Onyx Equity Partners
We also received a riveting update along with advice from CRC cohort member, Co- Executive Director Victor Vasquez of SOMOS Mayfair on their community development journey with their partners in the Si Se Puede Collective. He talked about the vision, strategies, decision-making structures, and their approach to working on acquisition/rehabilitation of properties. Victor also discussed their efforts to revitalize the historic Mexican American Community Services Agency site, a property owned by the Alum Rock School District.
CRC cohort members left the convening deeply informed, more connected with each other, and feeling supported in their efforts to begin or continue their work in community development. Our turnout for the CRC convenings remains high and consistent, resulting in a lot of buzz around the excitement for the next convening. Deepening our commitment to budding community development in Santa Clara County, we are also in the midst of providing a one-on-one strategic consulting service to five CRC cohort members, giving them intimate support in their aspirations.
SV@Home will continue to bring this group of over 15 Santa Clara County community-based organizations together to learn more about and incubate community development in Santa Clara County. The next convening in August will focus on learning the basics on how and who to build and maintain strong partnerships within the real estate development industry, as community-led developers. The CRC is also looking forward to the second tour of the year in September to the Unity Council in Fruitvale, Oakland. The CRC will convene two more times on a monthly basis after that through November.
Lastly, we would like to congratulate CRC cohort member, the School of Arts and Culture, for being selected to be part of a capacity-building cohort grant program provided by Housing Trust Silicon Valley to grow their organizational capacity and access funds to build affordable housing in the Mayfair community.