Profile

As a child, Kayra Lopez moved from New York City to Lawrence, Massachusetts with her family after they bought a home there. While she cites her stable housing in Lawrence to be one of the factors that influenced her to work in affordable housing development, it took her a few years to fully realize it.

Kayra began her career as an educator, and recalls how she has done all forms of education and taught all ages:

I was a high school history teacher, I taught, mentored, and coached graduate students on how to coach and mentor high school students. I was a middle school program coordinator, and in my graduate program, I held an after-school program for elementary and high schoolers.

During this time, Kayra eventually discovered that the educational frameworks she was working in limited the ways she could support her classes. She explains, “I always knew that whatever community I wanted to be a part of and support in building, I wanted [my work] to be aligned with all of who they were, not just their ‘learning self.’”

In 2020, Kayra saw an open role at The Neighborhood Developers (TND) and was inspired to apply by her personal philosophy as an educator: “I always.. wanted to learn how to build healthy learning communities. Healthy learning communities and healthy living communities go hand in hand.” She joined the TND team soon after as a Program Assistant. One of Kayra’s admin tasks in this new role was to initially research how they could build a fellowship designed to help people of color begin careers in affordable housing development. When it was eventually time to roll out The Fellowship for Equitable Affordable Housing Development (FEAHD) in partnership with Urban Edge and Opportunity Communities, she decided to join.

As a FEAHD Fellow, Kayra is learning how to become an effective and versatile project manager, and she is noticing parallels between her new role and previous experience. She describes how in “project management, we're generalists. I appreciate how that lends itself to being an educator, because you never know what question a student's going to ask. So, the best you can do is try to build the knowledge around it.” Kayra is currently working with Latino Support Network (LSN) in Lynn and is managing their first housing project, High Street: a 93 home project on two sites. One thing she finds especially valuable about this project is TND’s new soft cost goals which “ensure that our projects have a certain amount of dollars that go to minority and women business enterprises. We are [currently] working with an architect that's 100% minority based, which is really cool.”

Kayra discovered the Mel King Institute after joining TND. She started regularly attending our workshops when she became a FEAHD Fellow, since professional development training is a cornerstone of the program. Some sessions she found particularly helpful were our affordable housing finance and the asset management trainings facilitated by Jack Geary. She explains:

my largest area of growth coming into affordable housing was finance… those trainings have been so helpful for me to understand all the intricacies of maintaining affordable housing project finances. And [Jack] used to work at Urban Edge, so it was nice to hear from somebody who is familiar with the Boston CDC world.

Looking forward, Kayra hopes to continue supporting healthy communities and community members. When she’s not in the office, Kayra enjoys writing poetry, reading birth charts, and cooking new vegan recipes, often accompanied by her cat, Nona.