A national network of funders supporting strategic, innovative, and effective solutions to homelessness

April 2019

Return to the Calls and Convenings page

At the March convening in Portland, participants named centering people with lived experience as a critical first step to advancing racial equity. During our April call, we talked about ways funders can support the centering of people with lived experience. 

Pre-work

  • Please listen to the recording of Centering Voices of Lived Experience, a webinar Funders Together did in February with CSH and True Colors United. This recording is an hour long.
  • Please also read Action 3 of National innovation Service’s (formerly Future Laboratories) report of the work they did in Seattle and King County. If you have limited time this week, please focus on the Strategies section.
  • Bonus reflection question: What are a few things you can do to start or enhance your work to integrate people with lived experience in your work?

Resources Mentioned During the Call

  • The View from Outside, Tipping Point Community. This is Mayra's recently published report of the 300 person survey she conducted with a team of peer field staff.
  • https://www.bearstandingtall.com/ -- this is the Indigenous consultant that Dani is working with.
  • Fund for Shared Insight. Becca is working with Fund for Shared Insight in helping their workforce development boards better listen to their customers.

Meeting Materials

We joined Funders Together because we believe in the power of philanthropy to play a major role in ending homelessness, and we know we have much to learn from funders across the country.

-Christine Marge, Director of Housing and Financial Stability at United Way of Greater Los Angeles

I am thankful for the local partnerships here in the Pacific Northwest that we’ve been able to create and nurture thanks to the work of Funders Together. Having so many of the right players at the table makes our conversations – and all of our efforts – all the richer and more effective.

-David Wertheimer, Deputy Director at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

-President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964 State of the Union Address

Funders Together has given me a platform to engage the other funders in my community. Our local funding community has improved greatly to support housing first models and align of resources towards ending homelessness.

-Leslie Strnisha, Vice President at Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland

Our family foundation convenes local funders and key community stakeholders around strategies to end homelessness in Houston. Funders Together members have been invaluable mentors to us in this effort, traveling to our community to share their expertise and examples of best practices from around the nation.

-Nancy Frees Fountain, Managing Director at The Frees Foundation


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