Join NLIHC in celebrating our 2026 Loraine Brown Resident Leader Award honorees: Kennetha Patterson and Linda Lee Soderstrom. These exceptional leaders will be recognized at NLIHC’s Annual Housing Leadership Awards Reception on Thursday, March 12, 2026, from 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Instituted in 2025, the Loraine Brown Resident Leader Award is named after NLIHC Board Member Loraine Brown, and honors a person living in subsidized housing who has shown dedication to helping tenants, people experiencing homelessness, and their community.
Kennetha Patterson is a systems-change advocate and the current lived-experience cohort chair for the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) Nashville-Davidson County Homeless Continuum of Care. As the former Chair of the Homeless Planning Council and the first historical person with lived expertise, her leadership remains rooted in equity, integrity, and unapologetic truth—even when the path hasn’t always been fair.
Linda Lee Soderstrom is a dually licensed Hennepin County daycare & foster care provider for 60 medically fragile preschool-aged children prenatally exposed to alcohol & other drugs, five were whole family placements. Her one adopted son turns 40 in 2026. She has always been a Jill-of-all-trades, organizing in the fair housing community since 2015. In that community, they used their voices and grassroots power together to object to the displacement of over 2,500 extremely low-income Crossroads residents in suburban Richfield, MN
The NLIHC Housing Leadership Awards celebrate and honor individual leaders and organizations for their outstanding contributions to affordable housing for those most in need.
Honor the recipients of the Loraine Brown Resident Leader award and all of our Housing Leadership Awards honorees by donating here! Your donation will be recognized in the Leadership Awards Reception program, and your contribution will support NLIHC’s mission to achieve racially and socially equitable public policy that ensures people with the lowest incomes have quality homes that are accessible and affordable in communities of their choice.
Register today to attend the 2026 Housing Policy Forum Leadership Awards Reception!