(Illustration by Raffi Marhaba, The Dream Creative)
In 2015, nine major philanthropies recognized a significant gap in the field: Few national funders were working to address the upstream causes of homelessness and the ramifications of unstable housing on Black and Brown communities. These funders had the bold idea to form a new pooled fund, Funders for Housing and Opportunity (FHO), dedicated to addressing the cross-sector, systemic causes of housing injustice.
Many of FHO’s founders were part of the growing movement toward funder collaboratives as a way to have more efficiency, impact, and engagement with peers and practitioners. A 2021 Bridgespan Group survey of 100 funder collaboratives found that nearly three-fourths had been formed since 2010, and nearly half since 2015. The amount of money given through philanthropic collaboration has also increased: It now tops $2 billion annually. A growing body of research has been examining the key ingredients of funder collaboratives, how they are used, how they add value—and what happens when they don’t.
Although FHO is still a work in progress, operating as a collaborative positions us to tackle two kinds of problems effectively: those that require an intentional focus on dismantling systemic racism (and really, what problem doesn’t fall into that category?) and issues that require us to work across sectors and systems. Housing justice is our mission and a prime example of the kind of work that hits fully on those two characteristics. We share some early lessons and thoughts here about the future of funder collaboratives—offered from a place of humility, given our collaborative’s newness—to help the field learn in real time from this evolving and promising form of philanthropy.
What We’ve Learned
1. Funder collaboratives should be a “leading edge” of knowledge and practice for members.
Beyond grantmaking, funder collaboratives have the potential to create opportunities for broader learning and experimentation in philanthropy. FHO hopes to achieve greater systems-level impact by catalyzing new learning as a curator of knowledge and trends in housing, both for members and in the larger field.
We start by helping members see themselves in the housing justice space, regardless of the lens through which they view philanthropy and even if housing isn’t an issue that they, or their foundations, fund directly. We then engage people focused on many different issues by looking at the whole continuum of housing—from homelessness to renters’ rights to homeownership, and from evictions and displacement to equitable housing development and community ownership. Given our limited resources, we don’t (yet) make grants in all of those areas, but we actively learn together about all the pieces and how they fit together. This deeper learning captures funders’ imaginations, exposes them to ideas and situations they might not otherwise consider, and helps them figure out how to invest in cross-cutting solutions.
A leading edge doesn’t follow the easiest path. It pushes or pulls travelers gradually into unfamiliar territory, until they see where other ways of thinking about and doing philanthropy can take them. As FHO staff, we help members grow by working at the edge of what they know, highlighting examples of how our members, grantee partners, and others outside of FHO are leading, and helping them take what they’ve learned back to their organizations. Part of our job is to connect members who are trying something new with colleagues who have relevant expertise. For example, after learning about an FHO member’s grants to convert hotels into permanent supportive housing during the COVID-19 pandemic, we fostered learning opportunities about this approach and now several members are investing in that line of work on their own.
2. Racial equity and trust-based approaches are powerful—and necessary—drivers of philanthropy seeking housing justice.
FHO has a clear and explicit analysis of racial justice that commits us to dismantling racial inequities, repairing harms, and restructuring systems to ensure equitable housing and life outcomes for all people. This commits us to centering and supporting leaders who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color; BIPOC-led organizations; and efforts to build the leadership, power, and wealth of people facing housing instability, especially those who are BIPOC.
FHO’s commitment to regenerative grantmaking, which transfers management of financial resources away from institutions and toward communities where wealth has been extracted, and trust-based philanthropy is newer, but still critically important. We act on our commitment by evaluating and streamlining every aspect of our grantmaking processes to redistribute power—examining how we discover possible grantee partners, substituting interviews for lengthy proposals for first-time applicants, shifting from quarterly to annual results reporting, decreasing the amount of information we ask of grantee partners, and finding ways to connect our grantee partners with one another.
Members often say that these commitments to racial equity are a big part of why they joined FHO, and that the funder collaborative is a good place for them to practice different grantmaking approaches. FHO can support actions or positions that some individual member foundations aren’t ready to take on their own, such as funding policy advocacy or understanding how our grantee partners’ ability to engage people with lived experience of housing instability in their strategies makes the solutions they are working for more relevant and substantive. Our ability to take a more trust-based approach collectively allows funders to test strategies and witness their benefits before adopting them individually, which can help influence member organizations to make similar changes.
3. Systemic injustices are interconnected, so the solutions must be, too.
Although foundations have been trying to improve service delivery systems for a long time, philanthropy has much less experience tackling the systemic causes of social injustices or working across several interconnected systems. (The exception may be funders who work on the social determinants of health.)
FHO was created, in part, because our founders saw housing not just as a roof over our heads but as the foundation under our feet, on top of which all of life’s outcomes—health, education, economic mobility, social justice—are balanced. It’s all connected: Without housing stability, nothing else in life is stable.
Early in FHO’s existence, we asked PolicyLink, The Urban Institute, and the National Housing Conference to conduct listening sessions around the country. We heard a strong desire for philanthropy to support long-term systems change rather than stop-gap measures. This inspired FHO to address the root causes of homelessness and housing injustice, which often lie in the systems that govern how, and to whom, resources and opportunities flow. As these systems intersect and overlap, they compound racial and economic injustices in every sector.
To address the interconnected and systemic nature of housing justice, we identified three mutually reinforcing investment priorities
- Support policy advocacy and organizing to strengthen and improve policies, protections, and investments in high-quality, equitable, affordable housing for lower-income people, for BIPOC renters whose housing costs are unsustainable, and for people experiencing homelessness. Over time, focus in this area has evolved from unlocking more resources for affordable housing to advancing tenant protections.
- Shift the narrative about housing so that more people understand it as a basic human need, rather than just a commodity, and see homelessness as a failure of multiple systems rather than a personal choice or individual flaw.
- Elevate what works by lifting up, supporting, and amplifying initiatives that ensure housing affordability and redress racial inequities in housing.
There isn’t a hard line between these priorities. You need advocacy and organizing to shift the narrative so that policy makers will create more equitable and just policies, which will have more impact on what works at the local level. And what we learn from supporting successes at the state and local level—policy reforms protecting renters in New York State, for instance, or narrative work to advance ballot initiatives in St. Paul and Denver—informs what changes are possible at the federal level and for local collaboratives around the country.
4. A sense of community can produce the trusting relationships and learning that funders need to take risks and make changes.
Many of FHO’s members, especially at well-endowed foundations, don’t have to be part of a pooled fund to make a big impact in the field. They joined FHO specifically to develop relationships with colleagues and to share the challenge of learning and trying something new. The sense of shared identity sustains members through tough conversations about topics such as racial privilege and philanthropy’s role in power imbalances. It enables members to find common goals, even when their individual organizations have different missions. And it inspires people to rally around shared values to achieve those goals, even when the actions they’re supporting feel unfamiliar.
For these reasons, we deliberately invest in building community. We give committee members prep work before meetings, which creates accountability to their colleagues. Instead of following parliamentary procedures or voting to follow the majority’s will, we keep discussions going until the group reaches consensus. We also make time at FHO meetings for members to ask each other for advice and offer assistance. A recent meeting generated 26 asks and 16 offers on topics as diverse as eviction diversion, modular housing, community land trusts, housing production in Native communities, housing discrimination testing, decarbonizing rental units, measuring systems change, and working with health care anchor institutions.
Last but not least, we try to approach our roles as FHO’s executive and deputy directors humbly. Our job is to listen attentively to our members and grantee partners, cultivate trust, develop relationships, and make new connections in the field. This transparent, ego-less leadership approach further ensures that our members feel at home in the collaborative and the community it represents.
5. A funder collaborative’s power to influence change lies in the ability to speak with a unified voice and leverage collective capacities.
Speaking with a single voice representing shared values makes a funder collaborative’s message more impactful than it might be if the same ideas were conveyed by unconnected sources speaking individually. That combined influence can work in several directions. For example, during the lead-up to President Biden taking office, FHO and Funders Together to End Homelessness were invited to meet with the transition team. Some of our members wouldn’t have had access to those conversations if they had not belonged to the funder collaborative. And if the transition team had had to speak with dozens of foundation leaders individually, the messages they received would have been far less unified.
Tracing influence in another direction, we know and appreciate that the local and regional funders who belong to FHO like to leverage our collective resources and those of our national philanthropy members. Local funders don’t want to reinvent the wheel, and they can’t afford to, so they may use the housing justice frame and narratives from FHO’s work in their own grantmaking. This benefits local actors, and it extends our impact.
Looking Forward
Over the next five years, we hope to go deeper and farther in some of the directions we’re already headed. We expect to adopt more practices of regenerative grantmaking so that FHO becomes more field-led and so funders cede more power to people with lived experience in homelessness or housing insecurity, especially people of color, both through our collaborative and through members’ own foundations. From re-orienting our operational processes to better support grantee partners in achieving their vision of impact to revising our reporting requirements to reduce the burden on grantees, we hope to continue learning with FHO members and making strides to shift our practices away from extraction and toward regeneration.
We see room for growth in how philanthropy assesses risk in grantmaking. The old formulas continue to privilege applicants with long balance sheets, which typically are white-led while reinforcing the institutionalized racism that prevented BIPOC-led organizations from accessing capital and building wealth in the first place. It’s time to throw out those definitions—and to stop using “risk” as a coded way to talk about race.
We would love to see shifts in how Americans think about housing so that as a country we are more compassionate and recognize our interdependence. And we may lean more on using arts and culture as vehicles for narrative change so that messages about housing justice are embedded everywhere—in the music and stories we hear, the movies and theater we watch, the video games we play, and the poems and books we read.
We know that systems change doesn’t happen quickly or easily. It took centuries to embed racism in housing. It will take decades to change deeply ingrained narratives, and nearly as long to demonstrate the efficacy of solutions well enough to shift policies. But we also know that when funders learn and act together, when we combine not only our resources but our knowledge, experiences, and connections alongside a commitment to address power inequities in the philanthropic sector, our collective solutions have the potential and power to shift the field toward transformative solutions.
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Read more stories by Jeanne Fekade-Sellassie & Jennifer Angarita.