Coming Home: A Design Collaboration with Gould Evans

Rachel Jimenez
April 29, 2021
Blog, Moving
45 likes
Coming Home: A Design Collaboration with Gould Evans

We’re coming home! The Raza Development Fund looks forward to moving our corporate headquarters to South Phoenix, serving from the heart of our community. To do that, we partnered with Gould Evans, a Phoenix-based studio that knows the RDF mission and history, to design our new home.

“We’ve had a great partnership. They do good work, and we trust them. It was kind of a no brainer to choose them because they know us well and could understand the dynamics of what we’re trying to do and what we’re trying to create within the community,” shares Star Reyes, RDF’s Client Services Manager who has worked closely with the Gould Evans team on the design of the new building.  

Gould Evans shares our passion for South Phoenix. Together, we’ve worked alongside other business owners and residents in the South Central Collaborative, ensuring the community has input in the South Central Light Rail extension and design of our city. As such, Gould Evans understands the importance for RDF to create a collaborative space in South Phoenix. 

A Home Design  

This is not simply a move to a community that we serve; RDF is returning to its roots. We are coming home. Together, Gould Evans has helped us create a design concept to match that warm, homey feeling with light colors and the RDF logo as a framework for the design. 

“We wanted a very warm and inviting concept using our logo colors, the coppers, and the vibrancy of the green. We challenged them to use our logo and the history of our logo to maintain our roots and culture,” Star shares.  

The bird in the RDF logo, is an Aztec “Cuauhtli” (eagle), an element standing for our Hispanic ethnicity, roots, family, culture and traditions. It reflects the fusion of various races and offers inclusion and hope.  

Gould Evans took up the logo challenge well.  

 

A Collaborative Model  

The new RDF headquarters will be more than just a corporate office space. From the start, the vision has been to build a collaborative space for the community. Our new home will include working areas for community organizations to access better technology. It will act as a hub for community members to seek resources, training, and technical assistance with room for workshops. 

“We’re coming home. This is our home, in the corporate sense, our headquarters, but also a home for the community to have access to resources,” Star says.  

Accessibility is critical and a core component in the building’s location and overall design concept.   

 RDF is proud to continue this strategic and long-lasting partnership with Gould Evans as we work together to create a home for the South Phoenix community.  

Please stay connected with RDF as we share building updates on our website and social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.   

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Rachel Jimenez
Rachel Jimenez serves as Raza Development Fund's Communications Department Manager. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communications at Arizona State University. Rachel has extensive experience supporting content marketing efforts for national and state non-profits, as well as small businesses.
Phone 602-417-1400
Raza Development Fund (RDF) is the largest national, Latino-focused nonprofit Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). Driven by a mission to close wealth and opportunity gaps in Latino and other under-resourced communities across the United States, RDF provides responsible and attainable financial solutions to community-based organizations focused on health, education, affordable housing, climate resilience, homeownership, and entrepreneurship. RDF was founded in 1999 as a support organization to UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy nonprofit, formerly known as the National Council of La Raza. As a testament to its exceptional financial strength and impact, RDF stands out as one of the few CDFIs with a prestigious AA- S&P rating. Since its inception, RDF has invested more than $1.3 billion across 38 states, leveraging over $6 billion in additional capital.
In accordance with federal law and U.S. Department of the Treasury policy, this institution is prohibited from discriminating based on race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability. Submit a complaint of discrimination, by mail to U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Civil Rights and Equal Employment Opportunity , 1500 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20220, (202) 622-1160 (phone), (202) 622-0367 (fax), or email crcomplaints@treasury.gov (email).

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