By Hao Lu, News Correspondent

Living in a 300 square foot studio apartment at 73 Hemenway St. in the Fenway, Joyce Foster, a board director of the Fenway Community Development Corporation (CDC), has put efforts into community development for years.

“I wanted a neighborhood where there was a lot of culture opportunity, where there was good transportation and where I could find housing that would stay stable – where I would not be looking at increasing living costs over and over. I wanted to be sure that my fixed income would be enough to live on, and here it is,” Foster said.

Foster has been living in the Fenway for 12 years. At first she lived on Symphony Road. Two years ago, on Hemenway Street she bought her own co-op apartment, a type of the affordable housing that the Fenway provides to mixed-income community members, which allows residents to pay a low rate and share the utilities, taxes, insurance and other maintenance fees in the cooperation.

Foster owned a consulting company and put more than 20 years of experience in business, nonprofit and academic settings at the service of her company’s clients. Now she’s retired, but just as busy as she used to be.

“I’d like to say, yes, I still work, but not for pay,” she said, laughing. “Sometimes there are three meetings in one evening, then I have to choose which to go.”

Foster became involved in the Fenway community work very soon after she moved to the neighborhood. She has been on the Fenway CDC Board of Directors for 10 years. In 2005, she was nominated by the former state senator, Steven Tolman, to be on the Northeastern University Community Task Force, a group assembled by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, to work on the affordable housing issue with the university.

Every month members of the community meet with Northeastern officials to help address the concerns of the community. The university is in the process of creating a new Institutional Master Plan (IMP), which outlines building and enrollment plans the city of Boston requires universities to submit for approval every decade. It does this in partnership with neighbors – like Foster – and city officials.

Having been involved in two IMP processs, Foster said that the Fenway wanted to see more evidence of meeting community concerns in order to feel more comfortable with and trusting of the university.

“There is no way for us to impact what happens at the university, but the university impacts what happens in our neighborhood, strongly,” Foster said. “So if there is a regular, consistent, ongoing communication with high level university people to keep reviewing what’s happening in the neighborhood, to keep reviewing what the university can do, what the community would like it to do – to be able to have an open dialogue with the upper management of Northeastern. That would make a huge difference here.”

Foster and the other community members have been talking to Northeastern about building more dorms on campus to decrease the number of students living in the neighborhood, as well as to establish a job program so that community people would have access to jobs at Northeastern.

“The work of the Fenway CDC is work that I care about and I believe in. I’ve worked for years in areas of economic justice, opening access up to people who have barriers that have been put up to against them,” she said. “If you think about affordable housing, it’s creating access to something crucial, good housing that everybody needs. Also we care very much about jobs. Everybody should have a decent job with good benefits.”

The Fenway CDC and the Northeastern Community Task Force are not the only projects that Foster dedicates time to. Two years ago she became president of the board of the local paper, the Fenway News. One of her main jobs is to work on plans to increase both revenue and contribution of the paper.

“The paper is all volunteer,” she said. “If you care about your community, you want the community to have a voice. You want people to know about, to hear about your community. And this newspaper does that. It tells our community and anybody else what’s going on, and you find stories and opinion pieces on things that affect this community.”

Community work, however, does not occupy Foster’s whole life. Other than neighborhood meetings, she enjoys reading, writing and having lunch with friends. There are piles of books and CDs on both the shelf and the table in her apartment.

“The books are from [the] library,” she said. “You can see I read a lot. I like nonfiction, I like literary books, I like good writing. I like 19th century novels – dramas and coincidence.”

Next month Foster will have several meetings with the community members and Northeastern about the IMP program.

“We have to continue to have a dialogue [with the university], and I hope it’s not a fight,” Foster said. “I hope the university means it when they say ‘we want to acknowledge community concerns and we want to meet those concerns as best as we can.’ It’s a story and process. And the story isn’t finished yet.”