PSOs for Housing Justice

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

PSOs for Housing Justice

Philanthropy-Serving Organizations (PSOs) for Housing Justice

About

Funders Together to End Homelessness and Funders for Housing and Opportunity convene cross-sector issue-based philanthropy serving- and mobilizing- organizations (often called PSOs) to strengthen our collective work towards racial justice and liberation through a housing justice focus.

This group is focused on learning and improving collaboration with private funders from across sectors, emphasizing how different issue areas intersect with housing justice policy, to ensure communities are safe, healthy, and can thrive.

This collaboration of 12 PSOs meets monthly to build relationships across priority areas, understand the housing justice policy landscape, and organize around policy engagement opportunities for both our individual organizations and respective members. Through this collaboration we aim to learn and act together to move housing justice policy through cross-sector engagement by:

utilizing the influence of PSOs and their philanthropic members
exercising convening power for both philanthropy and federal partners
aligning messaging and narrative strategies around housing, homelessness, and philanthropy as accountability partners.

Current members include: Funders Together to End Homelessness, Funders for Housing and Opportunity, Council on Foundations, Economic Opportunity Funders, Funders for LGBTQ Issues, Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, Grantmakers for Education, Grantmakers in Health, Neighborhood Funders Group, The Funders Network, United Philanthropy Forum, and HouseUS.

Partnership

PSOs for Housing Justice is a collaboration spearheaded by Funders Together to End Homelessness (FTEH) and Funders for Housing and Opportunity (FHO). The initiative is generously supported by the Ford Foundation.

Contact

Interested in learning more about or joining the collaboration? Contact Brittani Manzo, policy advisor and consultant to Funders Together.

Do you like this page?

Showing 1 reaction

Lauren Bennett published this page in Learning Communities 2022-04-27 14:36:40 -0400

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