12/10/2025
Many thanks to NCDA Region I for this honor and to Mayor Garcia for his leadership. It would not be possible without the entire OCD team!
National Community Development Association
Congratulations to our City of Holyoke City of Holyoke Office for Community Development Alicia Zoeller for receiving the Paul Poulos Achievement Award from the New England chapter of the National Community Development Association (NCDA)!
For all of its advantages and opportunities, my hometown of Holyoke deals daily with struggling individuals and families...people struggling with homelessness, addiction, poverty and other social determinants of health disparities.
With all the challenges, Alicia is used to fighting for every inch of progress. She knows what it looks like when someone shows up year after year, through recessions, and recoveries, through changes in federal funding and shifts in political winds…she still finds a way to get families into safe, affordable homes, to turn vacant lots into places where kids can play, and to make sure that economic growth actually reaches the people who have been waiting the longest.
That is what Alicia does every day. She has been the steady hand, the strategic mind, and very often the moral compass guiding some of our city’s most impactful housing and revitalization initiatives. With all the uncertainty happening in our city, the country, and the world, she still finds time to roll up her sleeves when a family needs help. Paul Poulous believed that community development was about more than bricks and mortar, it’s about dignity, opportunity, and chances. Alicia, she has spent her career proving he was right and then taking his vision even further.
On behalf of the City of Holyoke, I thank the New England Chapter of the National Community Development Association for their recognition of a professional who is dedicated to the least, the lost, and the left out. Congratulations Alicia!
