Welcome to the Housing Justice Collective

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” 

- Lilla Watson & Aboriginal Rights Organizers

Welcome to the Housing Justice Collective. We are a team of five humans who want to use our skills, talents, love and time to fight in our collective struggle for housing justice and liberation. When we say we are struggling toward housing justice, we mean we are fighting for housing as a human right- a right that guarantees affordable, safe, accessible and stable housing for everyone through liberation from systems of oppression.

We believe that the way we get to housing justice is through principled struggle, through centering people and building trusting relationships, and through constant iteration and willingness to learn together.*

The truth about us however, is that we have had the experience of being the helpers, the technical experts brought in to help “save the day,” offer new ideas, or bring ideas that others have tried successfully. And we have had a hand in maintaining the status quo-- where we keep tinkering with systems that are designed to help people experiencing housing crisis, where housing justice isn’t the aim.

But here, as the Housing Justice Collective, we are trying on a new way of working alongside partners in the struggle.

As a collective, we want to shift the value proposition that bringing a group like us alongside your struggle means. We believe the only way we will achieve housing justice is if we all enter into and participate in the struggle for transformation and liberation together, in trusting relationship with one another, as people with a mutual interest in shifting power and decision-making to people who have experienced living on the margins because of systemic oppression, especially because of race, ethnicity, immigration status, ability, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

We want to lean into the struggle in our day to day...

• because the systems designed to provide affordable housing and end homelessness haven’t yet prevented or ended homelessness;

• because structural barriers haven’t been dismantled for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC); lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQ+) people; people living with disabilities, and everyone who has been shifted to living on the margins or for whom the current systems do not work.

And we want to stay curious, so that we are continuing to interrogate what our role is in the dismantling of these structural barriers, while fighting to dismantle them at the same time. And if we are positioning ourselves and our collective to help, rather than struggle alongside, then we have to look at ourselves and our value. We want to be held accountable to this goal.

Interested? Stay tuned for more. And contact us if you want to join us in this journey.
-Josephine, Kevin, Niki, Rivianna and Sarah  

*Our practice has been inspired by the writing and teachings of many people leading toward collective liberation including Emergent Strategy by adrienne marie brown and Transformative Organizing by Steve Williams.