| Roberta Drake is a member of the Navajo Nation, and was born and raised on the reservation. She began her career in housing with a temporary position at the Navajo Housing Authority (NHA), where she first became knowledgeable about mortgage lending in Native communities and began working with the HUD Section 184 Indian Loan Guarantee Program. Drake next accepted an offer from the Navajo Partnership for Housing (NPH), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, as a Homeowner Training Specialist to launch the first mortgage-based homebuyer education program on the Navajo Nation.
She worked with consultants to create “Sheltering our People,” a curriculum targeted specifically to Navajo people. Demand for homebuyer education continued to grow within the Navajo community so NPH expanded its program by partnering with NHA (the Navajo TDHE) to obtain Indian Housing Block Grant funds to hire more training specialists. Drake designed a train-the-trainer program for the new staff. She also began to speak at various conferences and in other Native communities about how to develop, implement and deliver a successful homebuyer education program.
NPH then created a mortgage department, which Drake managed. In this position, she initiated loan origination agreements with a lender partners and began offering conventional and construction loan products to first-time homebuyers on the Navajo Nation |
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