As a successful affordable housing, community development, support services organization based in three incredible immigrant gateway communities of color, The Neighborhood Developers (TND) cares deeply about race, equity, diversity, and inclusion (REDI). Living up to our mission -- to create strong neighborhoods, enabling community members to secure a stable home, achieve economic mobility, and determine their own future -- requires that TND fully represent the diversity and breadth of our communities through our people, programs, values, and priorities.
Our goal is to create an inclusive environment in which members of our team and community can remove barriers throughout our organization and communities caused by social injustice, inequality, inequity, and racial trauma. We are committed to elevating the voices of our team and community to reach this goal and have developed powerful ways to do so.
We recognize that we all, unfortunately, live in a racist society, but we don’t accept the status quo. Rather, we envision, and are actively working towards, a world without racism and prejudices that honors the culture, knowledge, power, and healing of Black, Indigenous, Immigrant, and Communities of Color. Considering our mission, and what is at stake, we see it as our collective responsibility to take decisive action and invite you to join us.
Our Process
Here is how we advance TND’s REDI vision and commitment:
We start by acknowledging that it is a critical, active, and, most importantly, continual effort. We also share the responsibility. It all starts with our team of dedicated staff and board members, who serve together on TND’s REDI Committee, which meets monthly and leads and coordinates our REDI efforts.
To make sure we deliver on our commitment, TND has developed a detailed REDI Action Plan, which lists over 60 action steps (with specific deadlines and assignments for implementation). The REDI Committee, with input from staff and board members, updates, and our board approves, the REDI Action Plan annually.
We are proud of our accomplishments so far. Following are some examples:
Held annual anti-racist/REDI trainings for staff
Implemented fun monthly celebrations of holidays and awareness months that honor diversity (including through book raffles that help us all learn)
Created a dedicated space of REDI resources for staff on our Intranet
Developed a revised equal opportunity statement on our job postings
Increased diversity of our staff and board
Set ambitious supplier diversity goals for real estate construction and asset management (we are currently also exploring such goals for soft costs and non-real estate vendors)
Created regular opportunities for community members to be actively involved in the design of our affordable housing buildings as early as possible in the process (e.g., our organization’s development priorities)
Empowered community members to also have a voice and an opportunity to be actively involved in our program planning, implementation, and evaluation (e.g., on the board, board subcommittees, focus groups, etc.)
In addition, TND staff members have helped to create and implement a racial equity pledge for community development corporations in Massachusetts through the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations (MACDC) and the Fellowship for Equitable Affordable Housing Development together with Urban Edge and Opportunity Communities (OppCo).
As an organization, community, and society, we still have a long way to go, so we are always looking for ideas to add to our REDI Action Plan. To this end, we actively engage in efforts to learn from other organizations (e.g., through OppCo, MACDC, and NeighborWorks America) and welcome your suggestions.
