Linda Brown is a softly-spoken realtor (房地产经纪人) with a passion for helping the homeless. She's moving mountains by combining her understanding of real estate with her kindness-fueled determination to create beautiful permanent homes for disabled homeless people in her community.

In 2020, Mrs. Brown was awarded the Good Neighbor Award. This honor is initiated by The National Association of Realtors in the US. As its website details, working alongside her husband, Dr. David Brown, she has been transforming abandoned mobile homes into villages of tiny homes that offer permanent housing for homeless people who're disabled.

The wish to help homeless people, and restore their dignity and self-worth, as Mrs. Brown explains, had been a joint mission for some years. As local blogger Aaron Nichols shares, the couple ran a local evening drop-in center for local homeless people called Gardening Tree, for almost a decade. This functioned as a shelter where people experiencing homelessness could grab a bite, shower, do laundry and relax. 

But they wanted to do more than that. With local individual organizations' help, the couple succeeded in raising almost $5 million, which enabled them to transform unused mobile homes and a deserted trailer park into a small village of tiny homes that opened in 2018. They named the shelter "Eden Village".

As Mrs. Brown revealed in her award acceptance speech about her journey to creating Eden Village, helping homeless people is something personal, "I watched as my homeless friends walked off into the darkness to a hidden, wet and cold camp while we went home to a warm bed. I had to do something."

Today, Eden Village includes a 4,000-square-foot community center offering cooking and laundry facilities, as well as a medical center and community gardens. Additionally, more sites are being developed thanks to the land donated to the nonprofit founded by the Browns. Eden Village 2 and 3 are at the planning stage. In the next six years, Mrs. Brown hopes to create five similar villages housing up to 200 people experiencing homelessness.