Taking It Back To The Block
Freedom is experienced through the conditions that allow people to make meaningful choices about their lives. Stability, access, opportunity, belonging, and participation all shape that capacity.
The places that shape our lives should do more than generate financial return. They should help make freedom possible.
Vesi starts from a simple belief: the systems governing land, investments, and development reflect choices about what society values and protects. When those systems make stability harder to secure, they narrow the choices available to people and communities, threatening the foundational practice of freedom. Different outcomes require different structures.
We work at the scale of the neighborhood block because this is where larger systems become tangible. Homes, businesses, culture, institutions, capital, and public life meet here. It is also where the consequences of decisions about ownership, investment, and development are most clearly felt.
Vesi works to align real assets, investments, and community capacity with purpose and stewardship. We bring this work together through one connected platform. Our Asset Stewardship Trust stewards residential, commercial, and cultural assets around a defined purpose. This Land Project advances research, design, and advocacy, that supports new approaches to land, tenure, and investment. A Community Benefit Fund directs a defined share of value toward local capacity, enterprise, institutions, cultural resources, and future projects.
The result is a closed loop model built around a different measure of value. Financial strength matters, but so do stability, agency, continuity, and the capacity of people and places to shape their futures.
Vesi building the structures to make that possible. We invite you to join us and build what comes next.
Our Founder: April De Simone
April De Simone is the founder of Vesi and a transdisciplinary practitioner with more than three decades of experience working across housing, policy, design, and community development. Her work focuses on building real world systems that align ownership, stewardship, and long term stability of residential, commercial, and land assets.
Vesi grew out of April ’s sustained work examining how decisions embedded in policy, finance, and the built environment shape the conditions of neighborhoods and opportunity over time. The model reflects a commitment to shared-ownership, responsible resource use, and place based investment that centers long-term public benefit over extraction. In Trenton, New Jersey, she and her husband, Marcus, placed their own home into Vesi’s neighborhood trust as its first property. The project demonstrates new ownership models and alternative pathways for households and communities.
Alongside Vesi, April leads a portfolio of purpose-driven brands where she works with clients and partners across sectors, regions, and scales to shape systems and environments that balance public benefit, responsible resource use, and long term impact. This includes leading nationally recognized initiatives like Undesign the Redline and The Practice of Democracy: A View From The High Line, and has contributed to federal engagement efforts through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Building Purpose Community Engagement Toolkit. These experiences inform Vesi’s approach to governance, community participation, and purpose-driven impact.
Her upbringing in the Bronx, New York underpins a sustained focus on how decisions and perceptions take form through home and land systems, institutions, and shared spaces, shaping generational patterns across communities and environments. Her work has been recognized with honors including Enterprise Community Partners’ Impactful 40 and New York University’s Public Service Award. She holds a Master of Science in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons School of Design and a Master of Architecture from the Michael Graves School of Public Architecture.
Co-Executive Director: Nova Lucero
Nova Karina Lucero Vicioso is an educator, strategist, and community organizer dedicated to building grassroots power and advancing social justice. Currently serving as Co-Executive Director of Vesi, Nova brings over a decade of experience leading impactful campaigns across tenant rights, universal childcare, land use, and international solidarity. Throughout her career, she has coached emerging organizers, managed high-stakes political campaigns, and co-created transformative educational curricula at institutions like the City College of New York. Nova holds a Master of Education in Teaching & Curriculum from the University of Washington and is a former Urban Design Forum Fellow.
