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.”

10Oct

A Community-Designed Housing Justice Strategy

October 10, 2023 F4ICA 1

A core value of the Fund is holding the priorities of our community partners at the center of our efforts. We designed a learning and evaluation process that focuses on learning from our partners and ensuring our actions are accountable to their needs as experts living and working on the frontlines of these efforts.

Designing this second phase was an opportunity to push ourselves further into alignment, by designing a strategic planning process that was led by these same partners who have been with us and have a vision of what is needed to ensure California is a place where people of color, people living on small or no incomes, still all have a place to call home.

Our Community-Led Process

Our vision of housing justice and equitable development is one where the people closest to the issue have the power to lead and make decisions about their lives, their neighborhoods and communities. This is also a value we hold in the design and operation of the Fund for an Inclusive California. Early on in the development of our strategies we set up a process for accountability to organizations that are funded, to get their feedback and guidance on how we were doing as funders, and how we could better align our funding and processes to their work.

This practice took hold and deep trusting relationships were developed over the years working together. As we teed up the next phase of the fund, we knew there was a possibility to evolve and step even further into community-led strategies and decision-making.

“Having been in this work a long time, and never seen funders follow the lead of organizations, I was skeptical as to whether that commitment would and could be truly realized, but to my surprise, from start to finish, what I saw was funders approaching this with humility and recognition that it is those in the trenches moving this work forward and the best vantage point on what the strategic plan should be.”
Strategy Working Group member

The approach to developing F4ICA’s goals and strategies for this current five-year phase reflects our practice of transparent, accountable, and movement-aligned philanthropy. A nine-person Strategy Working Group made up of Community Advisors, who partnered with F4ICA during the first four years, were the drivers and decision makers of the F4ICA 2023-2027 strategic planning effort.

This vision statement developed by the Strategy Working Group, which serves as our compass for the next five years:

This future results from a long-term investment in and practice of power building that develops a mass movement and strengthens the organizing infrastructure in California to transfer power, political influence, and economic opportunity from the few to the many.

Through an eight-month process they shaped the priorities of the Fund for this current five-year phase, which have now been refined further through review and direction given by the organizations in each region.

“We had several checkpoints where we circled back with the other organizations. At the convening, we shared our best thinking and checked in with regional coalitions. helpful that as we were going through the process, we were circling back with folks on the ground.”
Strategy Working Group member

Over the eight months, the Strategy Working Group met each month, and were facilitated by F4ICA staff, and when funding strategies were on the table, we brought in our funder partners to gut check the approaches, ask questions to further develop the funding strategy and offer advising from their perspective on the field of philanthropy. In evaluation following the strategic planning process, the Strategy Working Group reflected that this process gave them the opportunity to inform the philanthropic direction of the housing justice field.

Reflections

Strategy Working Group members shared these unique takeaways from the process:

This is the first time the Strategy Working Group members participated in a strategic planning process for philanthropy that was truly created and crafted by grantee organizations.
While power dynamics are inevitable, these power dynamics were acknowledged and less of an issue.
Active listening in this process did not feel extractive.
Layering opportunities to include the voice of the larger pool of Community Advisors.
Important to engage a facilitator with movement and philanthropic experience.

“One of the moments that stands out a lot about the process, that I took big learning away from, was the day-long retreat in LA was exploring where we were five years ago and seeing how the things that were at the edges and we were pushing for that funders are funding now. Seeing that trend tells me that we need to keep pushing on the edges and hopefully will have funding – things like tenant protections that five years ago were not the thing to be funding and social housing might seem like out there ideas, but we should continue to be doing this work.”
Strategy Working Group member

“The resources to do the work and the capacities of our organizations are all finite and scarce compared to the need. The more we can all come together – practitioners on the ground and funders to think and do long-term planning together and think about the best and most strategic allocation of resources. Funders do their own strategic planning, but it should not be funders that figure out the strategic planning for the movement because they are not the ones who will carry it out.

are the closest to analyzing what solutions are most needed and most strategic to advance and analyzing the power we have on the ground and what power we don’t have on the ground to achieve the given solutions.

The brilliance of this approach is that it showed recognition that groups on the ground are in the best position to think through what the strategic plan can and should be over a long and short-term period to achieve the greatest impact for our communities. That should drive where funders put their resources. F4ICA demonstrated a great belief in our collective wisdom about what we can achieve now and in the coming years and what it will take to achieve it.”
Strategy Working Group member

For foundations interested in a similar approach, the group offered these insights and points of feedback.

Assess the strengths of pre-existing relationships among grantees and with funders to determine the depth of process needed.
Be bold and reach out to grantee organizations, including grassroots organizations.
Don’t engage in a similar process unless you are truly willing to take the advice of grantee organizations.
Invest in a facilitator that understands the movement and philanthropy.

“I saw a process that brought us together and worked hard to prevent the inherent imbalance of power. Organizations feel a need to put ourselves out in a way to make sure funders fund us, and measures were taken to tamp down that power and give those on the ground equal power in this process to shape the outcome without precluding the voice and wisdom of funders.”
Strategy Working Group member

“For such a complicated topic, did a good job of grounding in what was realistic. Being clear about the role of the Fund and honest about philanthropy and how far we needed to move them. We had a session with the steering committee (funder partners), and the session was great for putting things on the table, learning how they were trying to move internally and realize all the limitations.”
Strategy Working Group member

What is Ahead

The next steps of shifting decision making will be standing up a governance body that is made up of half Community Advisors and half funders, each with specific roles and responsibilities to guide the strategies of the fund, and organize funding of housing justice efforts.

10Jul

Our Next Phase: Doubling Down on Power Building for Housing Justice

July 10, 2023 F4ICA 0

There is significant work ahead for organizations across the state that are growing people power, working toward housing justice. They are meeting the call with organizing strategies that are visionary and rooted in experience. These are not wait and see moments.

Housing is essential to our well-being, yet Californians across the state are struggling to secure healthy, dignified places to live. Organizers are working to hold elected officials accountable to their responsibility to govern on behalf of residents, not corporations. They are fighting back against the outsized influence of corporations on real estate and land use in California, so our housing stock is preserved for the people, not as an asset on the private market.

As funders committed to long-term systems change, we are doubling down our efforts — with a five-year commitment, larger investments, and a co-governing body made up of the field and funders.

Our vision of housing justice and equitable development is one where the people closest to the issue have the power to lead and make decisions about their lives, their neighborhoods and communities. The approach to developing F4ICA’s goals and strategies for the next five-years reflects our practice of transparent, accountable, and movement-aligned philanthropy. A nine-person Strategy Working Group made up of Community Advisors spent eight months as the drivers and final decisionmakers of the F4ICA 2023-2027 strategic planning effort.

We hope to inspire you and set your sights alongside ours, shoulder to shoulder toward this vision statement developed by the Strategy Working Group, which serves as our compass for the next five years:

We envision communities where working-class people historically bearing the brunt of social inequity are decision-makers over how their neighborhoods, land, and homes are owned, developed, and stewarded. Housing as well as development policies and decisions are designed to maximize the flourishing of families rather than profit. All people have dignified, well maintained, affordable homes that support their rootedness and belonging.

This future results from a long-term investment in and practice of power building that develops a mass movement and strengthens the organizing infrastructure in California to transfer power, political influence, and economic opportunity from the few to the many.

We have formally stepped into the next phase of work for the Fund for an Inclusive California. There are many details laid out in the plan, but the approach is straightforward: continue to support base-building organizations to build long-term power toward housing justice and to organize funders to support those efforts.

The relationships and work that organizations took on in the last five years is illustrative of what is ahead. We are deepening these relationships and doubling down on organizing, community-driven innovations for permanently affordable housing outside of the speculative market, and further harnessing philanthropic resources for community power.

STRATEGIES

Doubling down on local and regional infrastructure for organizing and power building, to continue to grow the organized base and to link efforts across regions, and to the state level.

Supporting the holistic approach of intersectional organizing. Across the state, organizers are addressing environmental justice, immigrants rights, criminal legal systems and reentry work — all of these overlap with safe, affordable housing, tenant legal support against discrimination or unsafe conditions, and ensuring all residents have access to healthy living conditions.

Staying at the leading-edge of innovations in community ownership and electoral organizing. We are expanding the tools in the toolbox to meet the scale of the challenge — address systemic challenges with community-driven innovations like social housing, land acquisitions, and cooperative land ownership. We will support organizations with flexible funding as they engage in electoral organizing, and invest in creative, community-driven solutions like community land trusts and co-ops.

Shifting more decision-making power to our community partners. We have evolved from a funder-conceived effort to a co-designed partnership with community organizations, and now through the community-led process we will be moving forward with a revised governance structure that puts community at the decision making table with funders.

Additionally, we will be hands-on, organizing and growing the network of funders aligning our sector to movement priorities. We already have funder partners that are on board and aligning more peers toward this work. We have $3.5 million in commitments toward our $5 million year-one goal, and a five-year $25 million plan.

The Fund for an Inclusive California at its core is about people: People of color, immigrants, working class people and people struggling to make ends meet — building power to determine what their communities look like.

We hope you will join in with your support, voice, and resources to make this vision a reality for communities across the state and beyond. Organized and aligned to the vision of communities on the frontlines, we can break through to a new way of being in community and solidarity with each other.

In solidarity,

Alicia Olivarez, Interim Co-Executive Director, Power California, Strategy Working Group

Cynthia Strathmann, Executive Director, SAJE (Strategic Actions for a Just Economy), Strategy Working Group

Jazmin Segura, Director, Fund for an Inclusive California

Strategy Working Group

We want to recognize the members of the Strategy Working Group for their dedication and vision for the next phase of our work.

Lupe Arreola (she/her), Executive Director, Tenants Together
Veronica Garibay (she/her), Co-Executive Director, Leadership Council
Lorena Melgarejo (she/her), Executive Director, Faith in Action Bay Area
Alicia Olivarez (he/her), Interim Co-Executive Director, Power California
Vonya Quarles (she/her), Executive Director, Starting Over, Inc.
Karym Sanchez (he/him), Lead Organizer, North Bay Organizing Project
Amy Schur (she/her), Campaign Director, ACCE Institute
Derek Steele (he/him), Executive Director, Social Justice Learning Institute/Uplift Inglewood
Cynthia Strathmann (she/her), Executive Director, SAJE (Strategic Actions for a Just Economy)

07Dec

A Reflection on Rest

December 7, 2022 Jazmin Segura 0

24Sep

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

September 24, 2022 F4ICA 0

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21Sep

[VIDEO] F4ICA Statewide Convening: Gathering and Grounding In Community-Led Strategy

September 21, 2022 F4ICA 0

Representing the diverse communities and interests across the five California regions of the Fund, the eight member Strategy Working Group shared an initial draft of the strategic plan which was a product of several strategy meetings, going through notes from 40 one-on-one meetings with Community Advisors, one cross-regional Strategy Conversation, and a series of conversations with each of the five regions in the F4ICA. At this statewide convening, the Strategy Working Group shared how they integrated the information and analysis as well as the logic behind the draft plan and framework. They reflected how this process has been a powerful example of community and philanthropic partnership that centers the voices of those base-building organizations.

It was affirmative for our team to hear direct feedback and guidance from Community Advisors who have been partners for years, and who we continually center in decision-making for the fund. Community Advisors and members of the Strategy Working Group expressed feeling seen and heard in the strategy documents as well as process.

They said we would drive the strategy creation. Lo and behold, that is actually how it is,” one Strategy Working Group member shared. Another Community Advisor shared, “This strategy document shows you have really been listening to us around how we think about our work and what we aspire to do.

The cultural opener, Felcia ‘Fe’ Montes of Mujeres de Maiz, as well as our emcees Derek Steele of Social Justice Learning Institute, and Dana Ginn Paredes, F4ICA Lead Consultant, set the tone for the day. We were able to breathe collectively and acknowledge the land we were on and call in the original caretakers of the land.

This convening powerfully advanced the strategic planning conversation. Community Advisors and key funder allies became clearer and more aligned around the vision for F4ICA 2.0. There was general resonance with the draft framework, goals, and strategies shared on F4ICA 2.0. A few of the main approaches that we all dove deeper into include:

— The broad category of Community Driven Affordable Housing Innovations including the various sub-components such as social housing, community land trusts, and TOPA / COPA.

— Continued capacity building and infrastructure building work, particularly at the regional level, with civic engagement and communications capacities named as important focus areas

— Discussing housing work intersectionally, particularly incorporating criminal justice and climate intersections.

We are excited to share more about the strategies the Strategy Working Group, Community Advisors and funder allies discussed, including leveraging foundation influence in public and philanthropic spheres as we finalize and adopt the approved plan in late 2022.

Professor Ananya Roy from UCLA Luskin Center for Democracy and Power ignited folks’ desire to build relationships with academia and figure out how to bridge those connections and use academia as a tool for their own campaigns. In her inspirational keynote she shared research and examples of power building and efforts on the horizon of housing justice.

The term “racial banishment” stuck with us as she explained that we are past gentrification, and are at a place where city officials and police are making staying in place illegal by so many means. Professor Roy and Community Advisors shared how urgent, and life and death, the situation is around housing for low-income people of color in California. They foreshadowed the need for more direct action as well as use of eminent domain and occupations to stop business as usual of evicting, incarcerating and banishing people from their homes and communities. Funders need to wrestle with how they support communities they work with in these moments.

We gained valuable insights and grounding in the regional context across all five geographic areas where we have focused. The conversations around community-driven affordable housing innovations and funder organizing resonated across regions and with funder partners.

We facilitated full group and break out sessions to gather information on the strategies put forth by the Strategy Working Group – to ground them in the lived experiences and context of each region and for funders aligning with this work. In regional groups, Community Advisors voted on which strategies and outcomes were high and medium priority. This prioritization exercise illuminated how regions feel about the relative priority of these goals as well as which strategies and outcomes are most important in which region. The Strategy Working Group is also looking for themes across the regions to inform the final goals, strategies, and outcomes of F4ICA 2.0.

There is enormous potential for F4ICA in our next phase, grounded in the experience and relationships of our last five years of work. The statewide convening filled us all with great hope and put us on a path to ensure that the next iteration of the fund is completely supportive of what front line communities are asking for. The second phase is taking shape – with fuller details ready to share in December and into the new year.

We’re full of gratitude, excitement and determination to see through this community-driven vision and strategies for permanent affordable housing, stewardship, and thriving neighborhoods across California.

11Dec

Inland Region Powers Multi-Racial Organizing for Housing Justice

December 11, 2021 F4ICA 0

The Funding from F4ICA and others made it possible to engage in rapid response,” said Sonya Gray-Hunn, Lead Housing Organizer at COPE (Congregations Organized for Prophetic Engagement) and an F4ICA Community Advisor. “We’re moving housing advocacy at the state and regional levels and focus locally on direct services, to be able to stop evictions, utility shut offs, and other denial of rights and services.
“We’ve benefited from collaborative funding efforts of our region including through F4ICA,” reflected Tom Dolan, Executive Director of ICUC (Inland Congregations United for Change) and an F4ICA Community Advisor. “Looking ahead, we hope the collective foundation support for the Inland Region will sustain collaborative investments and enable groups to go deep in our efforts to realize long-term housing and economic justice.

For F4ICA, investment and lessons from the Inland Region have shown us that coastal and inland challenges are interconnected, as are opportunities for building toward our collective vision for housing justice and thriving, equitable communities.

¹ We learned from local partners that the extreme racism in the Inland Empire created a desire for some community members to distance their efforts from the term “empire.” Through discussion with our local community partners, we resolved to use “Inland Region” as the term to describe this region in our work.

² Funding Housing Justice for Thriving Communities, Fund for an Inclusive California. August 2021.

³ Los Angeles Times, Tens of thousands leave Los Angeles County for Inland Empire. February 8, 2014.

⁴ Los Angeles Times, ‘Crime-free housing’ deepens racial disparity. November 19, 2020.

09Dec

Central Valley Builds Power to Guarantee Homes for All

December 9, 2021 F4ICA 0

In addition to pushing for expansive eviction protections, Central Valley leaders launched the Homes Guarantee campaign in early May 2021 that “looks like every person across the Central Valley having a safe, secure, accessible, and deeply affordable home. It looks like racial equity, community ownership, and keeping families whole.”¹

Community Advisors across the region note that F4ICA’s investment of resources and convening infrastructure in response to their needs has helped groups build relationships and power to advance housing policy wins.

“There’s definitely been more collaboration across housing organizations in the Central Valley because of the Fund for an Inclusive California,” said Trena Turner, Executive Director of Faith in the Valley and an F4ICA Community Advisor.

Turner went on to put forward a clear call to action for the Fund and its peers in philanthropy.

We encourage you to develop strategies with your philanthropic peers not only to fund the organizing,” said Turner, “but to create lasting resources that will enable us to branch off into new areas and to push policymakers further in service to our communities. We also call on philanthropy to explore opportunities to leverage private resources to match public funds.

¹ https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article253224683.html

01Sep

New Report: Insights and findings from three years of partnership for housing justice

September 1, 2021 F4ICA 0

Their vision is to shift the current paradigm of housing as an extractive tool for investment in the financial market, to housing recognized as a basic human need and human right. It is a vision where communities are stewards of the land they live on and determine how that land is used, not for profit, but for the well-being of the people that live there.

It is envisioning a future where people of color, particularly Black and Indigenous people most harmed by systemic racism, can live and thrive in California. Our work is to align and mobilize resources to support this vision.

Over the last three years we have developed deep relationships and learned immeasurably from and with our organizing and funding partners. Through this work we have experienced humility in listening and knowing that our role in philanthropy is to show up as a partner, organize resources, to lift community voices and amplify the vision and demands of grassroots power-building organizations.

As more foundations step into supporting systems change and power-building strategies, it is imperative that as a sector we do our own work to shift power to communities, and continue to dismantle harmful philanthropic practices that perpetuate injustice. The recent influx of funder interest in power-building should not come with a boom of top-down philanthropic solutions that distract from the voices and priorities of people who are most impacted.

This is a historic moment that calls for us to take bold action, leverage our resources towards systems change and invest to win. After all, we have a mandate from communities we partner with to use all points of leverage that we have in philanthropy to pursue transformative approaches that will achieve housing for all in California.

We are excited to join growing efforts that reimagine a world in which all communities, particularly those who have historically faced racism and discrimination, have the power to lead and experience joy, justice, equity and well-being in neighborhoods where they have access to an affordable, safe and stable place to call home.

Racial Justice