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A well-designed home is about much more than appearance. It’s about lifting up resident voices, planning more equitable communities and building better places to live.
Our national Design Initiative provides tools, programs, and research to support developers in mastering their design process to center the needs of residents and communities. We promote authentic community partnership to address years of racist development practices, which gave communities little agency in their future. We train developers how to reliably focus their developments on outcomes important to residents, like health, relationships, ownership, and pride, despite constraints of costs and short timelines. And we provide spaces for innovation in practice.
Here’s How We Do It:
- Provide field-tested resources, like the Design Matters framework and toolkit, to support developers in each step of the develop process while centering resident voices and equitable outcomes to create break-through projects.
- Build developers’ capacity and leadership in the area of design and construction, through programs like the Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute (AHDLI), to ensure that developments are built to ensure the pride, power and belonging of their residents.
- Deploy innovators to the field, through our Rose Fellowship program, to increase organizational capacity in the design process, authentic community engagement, and equity in the built environment.
- Seed innovation in the field by testing and releasing Tools and Resources to generate new ideas and advance best practices.
