Funders Together for Housing Justice Pennsylvania
We invite you to join the launch of a Pennsylvania collaborative of Funders Together for Housing Justice, co-chaired by leaders from each side of PA, Emma Hertz from HealthSpark Foundation and Maura Jacob from The Pittsburgh Foundation. Our goal is to align, educate, and mobilize philanthropic partners across the Commonwealth to advance housing justice and end homelessness.
This collaborative is a learning and action-oriented community of funders, dedicated to deepening our understanding of housing and homelessness policy, aligning our work across funders, advocates, service providers, and public-sector leaders, and advocating for policy change. Through our shared learning, coordinated engagement, and collective influence, the chapter seeks to advance policies that ensure safe, stable, and affordable housing for all Pennsylvanians.
What is Funders Together for Housing Justice?
Funders Together for Housing Justice is the only philanthropic membership organization devoted to housing justice in the United States. We provide critical resources and learning and networking opportunities to our members to increase their knowledge, capacity, and effectiveness in both the individual and collective work around housing justice as a way to end homelessness and housing instability. Funders Together acts as a vehicle for members to be part of a broader movement and bring greater financial and intellectual resources to the work.
Our work brings philanthropy together around best practices and innovation to ensure investments are maximized as funders in communities around the United States work towards solutions to prevent and end homelessness.
Funders Together for Housing Justice:
- Encourages and supports our members in risk taking and learning faster together.
- Inspires by connecting members doing critical work across the United States to each other as well as members with a local focus to national efforts.
- Highlights available opportunities for funders to be part of policy change and bring the collective philanthropy voice to advocacy at both the local and national level.
- Provides tailored learning that allows philanthropy to consider the role in best practices and emerging topics around preventing and ending homelessness.
FTHJ-PA's Commitments
- Moving people into permanent housing through proven best practices is critical to ensuring homelessness is rare, brief, and one-time.
- It is essential that philanthropy work in a public-private partnership model identifying where funds can be leveraged and spur innovation and collaboration.
- In order to effect lasting change, it is critical for communities to take a systems change approach to the work of preventing and ending homelessness.
- Recognizing policy change and prioritizing public resources is critical to our work and we believe funders should engage in and fund advocacy efforts at the local and national level.
- Historic and current structural racism contribute to homelessness and housing insecurity, therefore, it is critical philanthropy prioritize grantmaking with a racial equity lens and work with grantee partners to address structural inequities.
- In a grantee-centered approach and embedding lived experience in all aspects of our members’ work to prevent and end homelessness.
Questions?
For questions about the funder collaborative and how to get involved, email Wyatt Schroeder, Executive Director and FTHJ-PA Facilitator at wyatt@hemlockandforge.com.