Fellow Profile

Katherine Williams

“One of the biggest aspects of the fellowship is learning to navigate between the needs and concerns of residents and the desires of people who want to build in those communities. Design is important, but it must go hand in hand with meeting other needs in a community. These include jobs, childcare, and education for all residents. Community developers must take all these into account when looking to build for, or in, low-income communities.”

— Katherine Williams

Fellowship Hosts:
Visitacion Valley Community Development Corporation
San Francisco, CA
—San Francisco Housing Development Corporation
San Francisco, CA

The passion for design in urban settings that drew Katherine Williams to her Rose Fellowship began during her work with Howard University’s architecture program. There she gained an understanding of the opportunities that architects have to create change in communities. As she walked around Washington, D.C., and saw the vacant buildings, ideas formed for bringing buildings and communities back as assets for people and cities.

Katherine would put that creative spark to work right from the start of her Rose Fellowship. For more than a year, she worked on a range of projects from large-scale neighborhood planning issues to a community space build-out for Visitacion Valley Community Development Corporation (VVCDC) in the southeast corner of San Francisco.

“Katherine's contribution allowed us to step up to face several challenges in our neighborhood,” reports VVCDC’s Executive Director Jennifer Dhillon. “She helped us solve a long-standing problem—how to fund and build our library. She also is helping us analyze the impacts of some massive development projects planned in our neighborhood.”

Now in the last half of her fellowship, Katherine is working with the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation. Her primary role has been as the client representative on the development of an 18-home, 100%-affordable condominium development located on the main commercial corridor of the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood.

Enterprise Community Partners