In this blog post, Michael Durham, Director of Networks at Funders Together for Housing Justice, reflects on the lessons that shaped his understanding of housing as a core driver of health and wellbeing. Drawing from his experience at the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, he examines the tension between addressing immediate needs and advancing systemic change, and calls on philanthropy to hold both in pursuit of housing justice.

By Michael Durham, Director of Networks

Nine years at the National Health Care for the Homeless Council (HCH) preceded my tenure here at Funders Together. It was HCH that taught me housing as a “social determinant of health,” equipped me with racial-justice analysis, instructed me in single-payer advocacy, and insisted that “all people have the right to participate in the decisions affecting their lives.” Friendships with street medics, healthcare administration wizzes, and people with lived experience will follow me the rest of my life. It is no accident, then, that the Council’s fingerprints pervade our new publication Caring Collectively: How Health Funders Can Step into the Movement for Housing Justice to End Homelessness, which we offer as an invitation for health-focused philanthropy to see itself in the work of ensuring safe and stable housing for all. I will always be an HCHer.  

Midway through my time at the Council, I served on the committee that revised its mission statement, the founding version of which was “to end homelessness by ensuring comprehensive healthcare and secure housing for everyone.” In deliberation, some contended that the healthcare services the Council’s members provide do not really end homelessness: housing does. Others retorted with more nuance, that healthcare injustice is a major driver of homelessness and that health services are essential to shorten and mitigate individuals’ experience of it.  

Barely a month into my employment at Funders Together, whose north star was housing justice even under our prior name, this tension reemerged as I staffed a working group on medical respite/recuperative care. “Is medical respite housing justice?” my boss asked me outright. I stumbled through an answer like “well, not on its own!” Nearly four years later, my reply feels clearer. I hope Caring Collectively unambiguously names that:  

• Services for people who are already homeless consist with our understanding of housing justice when held in conjunction with systemic and preventative interventions and embodying antiracist and anti-oppression values. It matters to reduce suffering at the same time as we work to create the conditions in which the notion of living unhoused would strike us as absurd.  

• Ending homelessness always required housing justice because homelessness exists due to racist and supremacist policy decisions. Moving people inside and tending to their wounds was never enough. This means that having changed our name from Funders Together to End Homelessness to Funders Together for Housing Justice is not a pivot so much as just telling the truth.  

• While housing justice does connote upstream interventions that dismantle unjust systems and prevent homelessness in the first place, it should not just refer to tenant advocacy and de-commodified housing, for example. Housing justice should benefit people who are unhoused tonight. We must knit these movements together.  

At the center of Caring Collectively lie two continuums, the first visualizing where people experience housing precarity so that we can identify corresponding services and advocacy interventions that meet folks where they are. The second is a sketch of prevention tiers, acknowledging that policies should not wait for the threat of eviction. Zoomed all the way out, to truly prevent homelessness and housing insecurity, it instructs us to “repair the harms of settler colonialism,” the economic empire that included/s chattel slavery and continues today.  

This, to me, is what we ought to mean when we talk about the social determinants of health: communities’ ability to thrive is impaired by the political conditions that settler colonialism and chattel slavery produce, far more than the medical care people receive. There is no housing nor healthcare justice, therefore, absent structural transformation, through policies like universal healthcare or abolition of the carceral state.  

If the enormity of that vision doesn’t already worry you, observe Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s demonstration in his recent book Reconsidering Reparations that no reparations for slavery will suffice that do not match the global scale of colonization and its devastation of the environment: reparations requires climate justice. Our task is immense indeed. But here also is the gift of revolutionary analysis like Táíwò’s: wherever our north star may be, we must take steps to get there. Our paces can reinforce the systems that cause housing precarity and homelessness or they can undermine them. However slowly, may we choose the latter. May we step forward in the direction of liberation.  

Michael Durham (he/they) is the Director of Networks for Funders Together for Housing Justice. In this role, he mobilizes Funders Together members in communities of practice and peer-learning groups organized around topics or regions, all pointed in the direction of racial justice and liberation. Prior to joining Funders Together, Michael spent nine years at the National Health Care for the Homeless Council where he specialized in street medicine and decriminalization. He also served as the Board President of the Village at Glencliff, a bridge housing and recuperative care facility in Nashville. Outside of work, Michael is a writer frequently publishing essays and poetry on abolitionist organizing, recovery, and post-evangelical spirituality. A single parent, he resides in the neighborhood in which he grew up in Nashville with his daughters, Genevieve and Adelaide.