14Nov

Los Angeles’ Investment in Collective Visioning Sets Trajectory for Leading Edge Innovations

November 14, 2023 F4ICA 0

Setting a shared vision to advance work individually and collectively

At the beginning of the Fund for an Inclusive California’s work with the LA-based Community Advisors, they raised the need for a planning retreat that would bring groups together and build relationships to coalesce in a broad, shared vision for housing justice and equitable development.

We resourced and helped convene the LA planning retreat in late 2019 to set a shared north star vision for housing justice across 15 organizations that continues to guide Community Advisors today. As a result of this retreat participants agreed to take the bold step of creating a regional planning and coordination framework, the LA Housing Movement Lab, to analyze progress, campaigns and opportunities on an on-going basis.

The North Star process was really profound in the sense that we are working in a bunch of different spaces on a bunch of different campaigns, but there is a connective overarching objective that we’re building towards. It has created a mind-expanding experience in terms of how to build strategy.
Public Counsel, LA Community Advisor

By working together with the convening support of the Fund and their north star vision, they have been able to align on longer-term work, not just from campaign to campaign. This is a key strategy in longer-term power building. Each organization continues powerful individual organizational work that is relevant to their base, and builds under this shared vision.

“Not having to react in the moment with 15 different small policy proposals, but being ready to say what we need to decommodify housing, and having that at the start of the echo chamber, ready to roll, that was really, really helpful.”
– Strategic Actions for A Just Economy (SAJE), LA Community Advisor

Creating Leverage for Public Dollars and Policy: $14 Million for Community Land Trusts

In 2020, LA groups came together to advocate for Project Roomkey, which allowed Californians made vulnerable by the pandemic to access affordable housing in hotels and motels. In 2021, some of these LA groups established the Los Angeles Acquisition/Rehabilitation Working Group in partnership with Los Angeles Community Land Trust Coalition (LACLTC), affordable housing developers, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, and Enterprise Community Partners.

The working group secured $14 million in public funding to resource social housing strategies focused on community land trusts, received additional philanthropic funding and successfully advanced policy changes to work toward tenant ownership through the community land trust model.

Developing and Passing Landmark Policy: Measure ULA

Today, local advocates continue to advance their shared goal of decommodifying 20% of all housing stock in Los Angeles County by 2050. Measure ULA (ULA), an idea that was incubated in the Housing Movement Lab and delivered on by a strong coalition of homeless service providers, affordable housing nonprofits, labor unions, and tenants rights groups.

Community Advisors and their allies successfully drafted and passed this ballot measure during the November 2022 election cycle. Also known as the “mansion tax,” advocates estimated the one-time tax on sales of residential and commercial property over $5 million would generate $900 million annually in new revenue for supportive and affordable housing programs, including development, construction, acquisition, rehabilitation, and operation of housing. Funds will also help pay for programs that provide short-term emergency rental assistance, eviction defense, tenant outreach and education, cash assistance for low-income seniors and individuals with disabilities, and tenant harassment protections. Pending litigation efforts have forestalled the full implementation of ULA.

Los Angeles’ housing justice movement has a critical opportunity to make advances in spite of the lawsuits. Given that Mayor Karen Bass has committed a modest $150 million for ULA while the lawsuits are pending, advocates are now focused on how the city is allocating these dollars. With $10 million allocated for housing innovations, advocates have an opportunity to pilot models like community land trusts, as well as informing the guidelines with pro-social housing components, such as strong tenant management with city-owned properties.

“There is continued advocacy so the city sets a plan and that implementation is aligned with the vision. There is urgency to show that these are viable models…and how quickly we can show success.”
Community Advisor

Leading Innovations: Labor and Housing Aligning

Strong collaboration and connections between worker organizing and housing justice is also a distinctive feature of the Los Angeles landscape.

Community Power Collective’s constituency, all street vendors are tenants. The organization engaged in tenant organizing with street vendors as the pandemic worsened the living and working conditions of street vendors and their families.

ACCE members in Los Angeles are engaging workers on three fronts, including its partnership with SEIU in a campaign to hold the University of Southern California responsible for its expansion and efforts to gentrify neighborhoods and increase displacement of low-income residents living near the campus.

ACT-LA, Korean Immigrant Workers Alliance, and Innercity Struggle are building relationships with local labor unions and worker centers as their members increasingly identify the lack of affordable housing as their primary concern.

As with other regions throughout the state, Los Angeles renters are organizing to strengthen tenant protections and make them permanent. The Keep LA Housed Coalition continues to work towards strengthening the local ordinance that protects tenants from landlord harassment.

At the county level, the coalition continues to advocate for a Tenants Bill of Rights. In collaboration with statewide partners, ACCE Los Angeles, Inner City Struggle, and L.A. Voice strongly advocated for and mobilized their members to secure the passage of SB-567, the Homeless Prevention Act that closes loopholes to prevent unjust evictions, provides mechanisms for accountability and enforcement, and gives residents and cities the power to sue landlords who illegally evict or raise rents.

Leading Innovations: Community Ownership and Control

By gathering and setting an aligned vision, partnerships are underway that are at the leading edge of housing justice innovations in the state, all coming from Los Angeles.

Community Power Collective has partnered with Fideicomiso Comunitario Tierra Libre to acquire and jointly operate buildings. This partnership seeks to build the organizing capacity of its residents to advocate for policies that will advance community control of land and housing at the city and county level.

The Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI) has secured capital to purchase land and develop 120 units of affordable housing. SJLI seeks to practice a collective ownership model so that residents will become 50% owners of the project. This project aims to “show the city of Inglewood that you can create 100% affordable housing and it will not create a ‘ghetto.’”

Little Tokyo CDC provides technical assistance and capacity building to expand community ownership models through partnerships with community land trusts. Little Tokyo CDC is committed to partnering with local base-building organizations so that BIPOC communities can learn to “develop on their own.”

24Sep

Overarching Impact Brief: Supporting a Community-led Vision for Housing Justice and Equitable Development

September 24, 2022 F4ICA 0

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11Dec

Invest in Equity to Meet California’s Housing and Community Needs

December 11, 2021 F4ICA 0

Fund for an Inclusive California supported the funding of our campaign to end financial speculation in land and housing,” said Rae Huang, Senior Organizer with Housing Now!. “Our coalition members often ask: what can we do to transform the situation we’re in? Communities are looking for bigger structural changes, and one path is to follow the money to understand where the power lies. We want to reclaim our own land, and create housing for ourselves, our families, and our neighbors.

California has the opportunity to lead the nation in housing justice and thriving communities. For this to become a reality, we at F4ICA are committed to joining with fellow funders to strengthen statewide leaders’ capacity for advocacy paired with increased investments in stronger local organizing infrastructure that will add up to a powerful and lasting statewide coalition that works to meet the needs of communities across the state.

^{¹ These principles were adapted from a sign-on letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins, and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon; dated June 17, 2021.}

21May

Invest in Equity to Meet California’s Housing and Community Needs

May 21, 2020 F4ICA 0

Behind a Collaborative Funding Push to Build Movements and Organizing Power

Philanthropy has become increasingly comfortable with funding community organizing and movement building to advance racial and economic equity, particularly in response to threats to democracy, civil rights and community life since the 2016 election. At the same time, funders have given growing attention to land use and affordable housing challenges in many communities. This is especially true on the West Coast, where leading funders in California have come together to support grassroots organizing to address the root causes of long-term housing challenges that are squeezing low and middle-class households as well as driving a surge in homelessness.

Coming Together

The Fund for an Inclusive California was launched in the fall of 2017 after a couple of years of meetings and planning among foundations concerned about increasing displacement and gentrification in communities of color across the state. Several of the funders had supported grassroots organizing and had noticed that these strategies were not typically part of philanthropy’s efforts around housing, which has tended to support direct services and affordable housing production.

The funders engaged in a “learning journey” to better understand the causes of displacement and what policy and organizing could do to address it. For Alexandra Desautels of the California Endowment, the joint learning about root causes of displacement in communities that funders were working in was vital to getting them on the same page. The group quickly realized that by pooling funding and efforts they could better coordinate to support policy advocacy and community-driven solutions.

The fund is part of a larger effort by Neighborhood Funders Group to mobilize philanthropic support for movement- and power-building through its Amplify Fund. Organizers of the fund learned from philanthropic collaboratives like Native Voices Rising and Climate Equity Action Fund in supporting grassroots organizing and movements.

In addition to Amplify, funding partners include public and community foundations (East Bay Community Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, California Community Foundation and Liberty Hill Foundation), private and family foundations (Akonadi Foundation, the California Endowment, the James Irvine Foundation, Weingart Foundation, Sunlight Giving), as well as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. To date, it has mobilized nearly $11 million for efforts in four regions (Bay Area, Central Valley, Inland Empire and Los Angeles), as well as statewide.

Sharing and Building Power

The backbone of the Fund for an Inclusive California is Common Counsel Foundation, a social justice funder with 30 years of experience working with donors and activists to build community leadership. Common Counsel’s staff is well-versed in organizing and social justice work. Jazmin Segura, program officer for the fund, has a background in immigrant rights organizing. As she says, “We believe that low- income communities and communities of color who bear the brunt of unjust housing policies and the negative impacts of profit-driven development should have decisionmaking power to determine what development looks like in their local neighborhoods.”

The funding partners serve as the steering committee for the fund, and they oversee the budget and work of the backbone. What is unique about the fund is that the funders share power with a group of 35 community advisors, made up of the core grantees in the regions who are directly involved in organizing and movement building.

According to Jazmin, “it was important for us to lean on the process and relationship-building” in setting up the fund. The funders determine which regions to focus on and select the core grantees that receive core operating support. The community advisors provide input into priorities and values for the fund and develop strategies for grantmaking to support capacity-building and organizing infrastructure in each region. According to Tony Samara, a community advisor representing the Regional Tenant Organizing Network in the Bay Area, these funds support meetings, assemblies and grants to grassroots organizing groups.

The steering committee and community advisors have created a table for shared learning, planning and decision making, and they work from a common project budget. At one of their joint meetings, a community advisor declared that it was the first time in her 35 years of working in the nonprofit sector that a funder had shared their budget with a grantee.

From the grantees’ perspective, this is refreshing, because it demonstrates changed behavior from funders, not just platitudes and words about partnership and “co-creation.” As Tony Samara explained, “there’s actually now a collective space that’s become somewhat institutionalized… it creates another cultural center of gravity.”

In addition to core operating support and funding for capacity-building and movement infrastructure, a portion of the fund is set aside for emerging opportunities that arise. This has been useful as work in regions has expanded, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. With increasing challenges of residents losing jobs or housing, or suddenly needing help with child care and healthcare for essential workers, the fund has provided rapid-response funding for a range of community efforts and organizations, many outside the community advisor group.

In response, the fund has also simplified processes in the face of the pandemic to lessen burdens for grantees (e.g., accepting proposals submitted to other funders, advancing grants directly for renewal and not requiring final reports). This flexibility has been appreciated by grantees, who have had to adjust to organizing in an environment where in-person meetings and actions are not viable, and the challenges faced by low-income renters have multiplied.

Learning for the Future

The Fund for an Inclusive California was set up with a three-year timeline, designed to sunset in 2021. Outcomes from the collaborative approach to funding, learning and decision-making have been impressive. Funders and grantees have created joint understanding and approaches, and funders have shared power in important ways that have supported organizing capacity and infrastructure and provided funding to grassroots community groups.

On the policy front, the network of community advisors was instrumental in raising awareness and getting landmark tenant protection policies passed at the state and local levels in 2019, and they are deeply involved in current efforts to provide relief for renters in the face of the pandemic and economic crisis.

Given the success, as well as the continuing—and, in the current economic crisis, undoubtedly growing—need, the fund will probably not completely disappear next year. According to fund organizers, they are currently in conversation about how it might “evolve” or “transition,” seeing this current period as perhaps the first phase of a longer effort. A collaborative learning and evaluation process is informing this work and sharing lessons more broadly with the field and philanthropy. The fund’s approach to core support and regional infrastructure has provided stability and built trust to let grantees do the work they are best positioned to do. As Alex Desautels summarized, “when you provide space and flexible support, good things happen.” A collaborative can be a safer place for foundation program staff to engage in these types of practices (e.g., core support and funding organizing), even if they cannot in their own organizations.

Community advisor Tony Samara’s advice to funders is to “study this model and replicate it; I would love to see funds like this all over the country.

The fund’s approach to flexible funding and shared decision-making has also broadened the tent, growing what organizers call the “bigger we” fighting for more just housing and community development policies. Groups from sectors such as education, criminal justice and immigrants’ rights are engaged, as they recognize the intersections between their issues and housing stability. For both funders and grantees, the collaborative approach and relationship-building have created what Alex Desautels called a “ripple effect into deep partnerships,” even beyond the work of the fund.

The Fund for an Inclusive California represents a promising example of how philanthropy can address the racial and economic inequities that plague our communities. By creating shared understanding, learning and decision-making, and providing flexible support for organizing and power-building, the fund is set up to build infrastructure for long-term structural and systemic change.

Bill Pitkin is a social justice advocate and leader who has worked in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors for more than 25 years. Currently, he advises nonprofit organizations and foundations on strategy and social change. Twitter: @billpitkin