Interview with Rosia Parker and Latricia Giles
In Charlottesville, Virginia, tenants are organizing together to take action against harmful policy and to strengthen their communities. For tenant leader Rosia Parker, the fight for equity and justice is deeply personal, rooted in lived experience and a commitment to protecting her community from displacement. Parker’s own experience navigating housing instability, including homelessness, while raising a family and working to secure permanent housing has motivated her to work toward solutions for people experiencing similar challenges. Her dedication to this work entails working through confusing systems, limited access to resources, and a lack of accountability from people in power.
That experience now shapes what this issue’s title means to her, “collective strength through adversity.” “The trauma that you endure, it strengthens you,” Parker says. “Resilience is being able to stand up and speak on my behalf and on behalf of others.” Today, Parker is doing exactly that, speaking out alongside her neighbors as Charlottesville faces mounting redevelopment pressures. In historically Black neighborhoods like 10th and Page and Westhaven, residents are organizing against development and potential displacement tied to student housing expansion, university growth, and private investment.
“They’re overrunning the Black and brown neighborhoods,” Parker says. “That don’t leave us no choice but to fight.” From large-scale student housing developments to new commercial projects and hotels, Parker recognizes the transformation of her community, one that risks displacing long-time residents and erasing neighborhood history. Even the projects labeled as “affordable,” often fail to reflect what affordability truly means for people already struggling to stay housed in the area. Through public meetings, protests, and coalition building, residents and community members like Parker are demanding to be heard. Groups like the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR), along with student and local allies, are helping amplify those voices and build collective power. “Power is in the people,” Parker says. “And we’re not going to stop.” For Parker, organizing is both practical and personal. It means showing up, even when you are not invited, taking notes, documenting decisions, and holding leaders accountable. It means doing the research, building strategies, and moving step by step. “You got to be at the table,” she says. “And if they don’t want you there, you still document everything.”
Organizing and striving for collective healing also means building trust. Parker reflects on this, “If you don’t have trust, you don’t have anything.” “Healing comes with learning. How to cope with trauma, mental health, physical health, being engaged with one another in unity, and solidarity, being as one, understanding what one has gone through and looking at the experience of that. And being able to work together as a collective,” Parker adds, emphasizing that strong movements depend on honesty, shared purpose, and relationships. Latricia Giles, executive director of the Public Housing Association of Residents in Charlottesville, echoes that focus on collective power while grounding it in a broader vision of liberation. “No one’s free until everybody’s free,” she says. For Giles, housing justice is inseparable from the fight for human dignity and requires bringing people together across communities and experiences. At the core of her work is a commitment to centering resident voices. Too often, she says, decisions are made without meaningful input from the people most affected. “Communities know what’s best for them,” Giles says. “We have to actually listen to the people.” Both Parker and Giles emphasize that organizing does not require a special formula. Instead, it starts with authenticity and lived experience. People come to this work because something has impacted or fundamentally moved them, and that connection is a powerful entry point for action. “There’s no secret sauce,” Giles says. “It’s about being your authentic self.”
At the same time, Giles underscores the importance of understanding history, not as something distant, but as something ongoing. In Charlottesville, past displacement and inequities continue to shape present realities. “For a lot of people, history is current,” she says. “It’s trauma that hasn’t been resolved.” The work, both leaders acknowledge, can be exhausting. That is why care, both individual and collective, is essential. “You cannot pour from an empty cup,” Giles says. “It is critical and essential that preservation of self must happen, and not in a selfish way. And it's not that you're not being in community or in the trenches. But if you empty, who's going to be there?”
Giles continues to reflect on the importance of care, “As a leader, sometimes I wish I would do a better job of continuing to cultivate that for folks, ‘I know you're going 110, but it's okay to go down to 80.’ I just want folks to please take care of themselves. And it's okay. That doesn't mean that you're not a warrior for the people. It just means you also got to be a warrior for yourself.”
Still, both return to the same core message: strategy must inform action, which drives change. “Hope is not a strategy, it’s action. It’s knowing your actions have wildly beautiful impacts,” says Giles. In Charlottesville, that fight continues through organizing, advocacy, and community care. It is a fight not only for housing, but for the right to remain, to be heard, and to shape the future of the places people call home. And as Parker and Giles make clear, it is a fight strengthened through collective power.