Each year at our Affordable Housing Month Kickoff Celebration we honor our housing heroes, individuals or organizations who are going the distance to create the world that we need. East Bay Housing Organizations is proud to announce the recipients of our 2024 Affordable Housing Hero awards — Ms. Cecilia Cunningham and My Eden Voice!
Ms. Cecilia Cunningham
Community Leader, Resident Community Organizing Program
Ms. Cecilia Cunningham has been a community organizer with EBHO’s Resident Community Organizing Program (RCOP) for the past five years. She has been involved in many of EBHO’s campaigns, including the ongoing campaign to redevelop the Oakland Coliseum to build affordable housing. In 2023, she represented EBHO’s RCOP at the statewide Residents United Network summit in San Diego.
Ms. Cecilia sees her calling as giving back to the community; when she’s not organizing with EBHO, you can find her involved with Communities for a Better Environment, the United Lutheran Church, or one of a dozen other nonprofit organizations. She is a passionate believer in housing as a human right, and won’t stop until everyone has a safe and affordable place to rest their head at night.
My Eden Voice
Building Community Power in Unincorporated Alameda County
Founded in 2018 to unite grassroots organizers in the Eden Area of unincorporated Alameda County, My Eden Voice has quickly become an influential voice in the housing justice movement. Fed up with skyrocketing rents, unjust evictions, and inhabitable living conditions, members of My Eden Voice formed Eden Renters United to educate the community on their rights and fight for further legal protections.
Despite facing a Board of Supervisors hostile to tenant rights, Eden Renters United has made substantial progress on its campaign, recruiting over 30 organizations to sign on to their cause, garnering mass press for their movement, and co-releasing the In the Shadows of Eden: Rising Rents, Evictions, and Substandard Living Conditions in Unincorporated Alameda County report with EBHO in 2023.