In this conversation Charu talks to Willie Jones, a community organizer and ordained minister in the Charlotte area.
In September 2014, Willie M. Jones retired from his position as Senior Vice President and Director of The Community Builders, Inc. (TCB) after nearly 29 years with the organization. Mr. Jones was responsible for new project and program development across 16 states and the District of Columbia. He produced several thousand units of affordable urban housing while at TCB valued at approximately $500,000,000.
During his tenure at TCB, he led teams in securing and deploying six HOPE VI Grants exceeding $25 million. In 2009, Mr. Jones led the project team in winning a $78 million NSP2 award. This funding supported the development of over 1,500 units of housing. Mr. Jones managed the loan program. In 2012, he led another project team in securing nearly $30 million in funding for a revitalization program in Cincinnati, OH.
Mr. Jones has received multiple awards for his work in affordable housing and community economic development, particularly his work against redlining in urban minority neighborhoods. He was one architect behind the creation of the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation and served as the first community Co-Chair of the Massachusetts Community and Banking Council. Because of this work, he completed a three-year term on the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board. In 2015, Mr. Jones was inducted into the Affordable Housing Finance magazine's Hall of Fame for his contributions to the field of affordable housing.
Mr. Jones moved to the Charlotte, North Carolina area resigning from the Board of Directors of the Urban Edge Housing Corporation after serving four years. He previously was on the boards of two other CDCs serving the Roxbury and North Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston. He was an officer at the Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he served as a Senior Steward, board chair of the Pastoral Residency Program (funded by the Lilly Endowment to help new pastors in transitioning from seminary student to full-time pastor), and the Pastor's Advisory Team that led a Chapter 11 Restructuring.
Since retiring, Mr. Jones has focused on strengthening the intersection between the faith community and community economic development. He volunteers as a mentor to recently released African Americans with the Exodus Foundation. He is the Board President of the Zachariah Alexander CDC, an affiliate of St. Paul Baptist Church in Charlotte, NC. He assisted in closing the financing on a 112-unit family and 72-unit elderly affordable housing projects, both in rapidly gentrifying African American neighborhoods. He helped a local Presbyterian church draft an RFP and selecting a development partner to invest $2 million from its capital campaign towards producing affordable housing.
Mr. Jones is a 1974 graduate of Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology concentrating in Urban Planning. Before joining The Community Builders, Inc., he served as an assistant to the Dean at the College of Engineering at Northeastern University. While employed at The Community Builders, he also served on the faculty at Tufts University's Urban and Environmental Policy Program and the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning's Professional Dev
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