Supporting the individuals, families, small businesses, and neighborhoods of Biloxi, Mississippi.
Focus Areas
Hope CDA defined itself as a disaster recovery and relief organization since the days immediately after Hurricane Katrina. Since then, it has risen to the challenges of the community, becoming a full community development agency, facilitating work in areas around the affordable housing initiative. It now focuses on four areas of development:
Affordable Housing
Hope, which started as a coordination and immediate relief center, is leveraging Katrina-relief support into longer-term investments in rebuilding. Animated by a large-scale community-based planning process conducted in the spring of 2006, Hope is implementing the vision of its constituents by assembling creative financing and funding packages to affordably rehabilitate or fully rebuild replacement homes for residents.
Community Organizing
Hope, using its position of trust, is organizing community members to create and implement solutions to quality of life and human issues. By identifying, training, and organizing a cadre of Neighborhood Captains to lead their neighbors in a variety of community engagement projects, Hope is working on a super-local level to empower and call all residents to action.
Economic Development
Hope is designing several economic development programs, which range in intensity from small business counseling and loans to providing full back-office incubator-type support.
Relationship Building
Working with a community that is tired and frustrated, Hope believes that providing an efficient, communicative, seamless experience is vital in order to earn residents’ trust and to boost their sense of hope.
