Where Community Comes Together: A Home, a Clinic, and a Job Under One Roof
At Copa Health’s La Victoria Commons in Tempe, ACF and its community of donors helped turn an empty lot into 104 affordable homes where neighbors can live, heal, and work in one place.
Drive past Apache Boulevard and the light rail in Tempe, and you will see something new rising from a lot that sat empty for two decades. La Victoria Commons is a five-story, 104-home community for families and individuals with modest incomes, its name a nod to Victory Acres, the neighborhood that has always been here. What Copa Health hopes people notice when they pull up is not only a beautiful, energy-efficient building, but a place to belong.
“We all want to belong somewhere, and we want to feel like we belong somewhere. And that is a big chunk of dignity.”
— Jennifer Dangremond, Director of Grants and Fundraising, Copa Health
That sense of belonging is the idea at the heart of the community. For the first time, Copa Health has brought its three pillars, housing, health care, and employment, together on a single campus. Alongside the apartments, the community is designed to include an integrated health clinic and an on-site workforce program, so a resident can find a home, care, and a paycheck without leaving the block. One piece, a planned sandwich shop called Copa Heroes, will create jobs for residents and neighbors alike.
For Joe Keeper, Copa Health’s Chief Financial Officer, the link between a stable home and good health is the entire point. The pandemic, he says, made it impossible to ignore, because it is nearly impossible to focus on your health when you do not have a safe, affordable place to live.
“You are never going to get healthy unless you have a quality, affordable place to live.”
— Joe Keeper, Chief Financial Officer, Copa Health
The need is impossible to miss. Housing costs have climbed across Tempe and the Valley, and since building slowed after 2008, there has never been enough. Quality infill land is scarce, and this parcel might have stayed vacant if the City of Tempe had not offered it through a long-term lease, making a nonprofit development possible. Meeting that need is one of the defining opportunities of this moment, and it is one Arizona can rise to together.
For Jennifer Dangremond, Copa Health’s Director of Grants and Fundraising, the magic is affordability, rents that match what a family actually earns. On top of that foundation come the wraparound services that help people stay housed and well: a food pantry, employment help, a cafe, a community room, and an integrated clinic where a care team, the property manager, and a resident services coordinator all stay in touch, so no one has to juggle six providers and five phone calls alone.
There is a quiet economics to this too. When people are stably housed and well supported, Keeper notes, they lean far less on emergency rooms, first responders, and the public safety net, and children who can stay in one school are far more likely to thrive.
None of it happens without the hardest dollars to find, the early ones. This is where the Arizona Community Foundation and its community of donors have made the difference. Long before construction financing arrives, a nonprofit needs money to turn an idea into something buildable, and ACF provided the predevelopment funding that got La Victoria Commons off the ground.
“Arizona Community Foundation contributed a lot of the predevelopment dollars up front that get these projects rolling off the ground.”
— Joe Keeper, Chief Financial Officer, Copa Health
That role goes back to Copa Health’s earliest days in affordable housing. It's very first predevelopment loan came from ACF, a brand new kind of funding at the time. Winning a competitive tax credit award took three attempts, and where a typical lender would have asked for its money back, ACF stayed the course. Its patience laid the groundwork, and ACF is now working to bring even more capital to that critical early stage, exactly the flexible support nonprofit developers need most.
No single organization could build and run all of this alone, which is why Copa Health anchors into the surrounding community and builds partnerships, from food banks and financial coaches to nearby Arizona State University and neighborhood faith groups. The result is a community woven together from many hands.
“It is possible. It is beautiful. It is urgently needed.”
— Jennifer Dangremond, Director of Grants and Fundraising, Copa Health
The model also points to what is possible next. La Victoria Commons is the first community in Arizona to combine two kinds of housing tax credits into one building, a hybrid approach that stretches scarce dollars into more homes. Copa Health already operates close to 700 affordable apartments across the Valley, with hundreds more on the way, and the need keeps growing.
At the Arizona Community Foundation, community is our middle name, and it is also our strategy. When donors invest in strategic focus areas like housing, alongside education and the environment, they invest in the people, partnerships, and places that make Arizona stronger for everyone.
To the donors who have already stepped forward, thank you. Your generosity is the reason a community like La Victoria Commons rose from an empty lot, and the reason 104 families will soon call it home.
Learn more about the work of Copa Health across Arizona at copahealth.org.
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