With the passage of an affordable housing millage and prioritization of publicly owned sites for development, learn how the City of Ann Arbor is embarking upon an unprecedented amount of affordable housing creation. Using an innovative partnership, community engagement is transformed from mandated “citizen participation meetings” to community driven planning and building a Community Leadership Council - who lead the community engagement work - composed of a primarily Black group of past, current and future residents, visionaries and changemakers. This session will describe multiple fractals of community driven planning that uphold a commitment to ongoing courage and resilience for acknowledging our complicity in anti-Blackness and other forms of oppression, power and opportunity hoarding, and the need for reconciliation and repair, to rebuild trust, as essential to any strategic and transformative work. We’ll uplift the necessity for creating space to honor the unique histories of a site and the people who worked, lived, and organized there.