Title
Follow up on Habitat for Humanity's housing research.
Body
Habitat & several advocacy partners collaborated to create and host a program called Then + Now: Housing Access, Insecurity, and Discrimination in La Crosse.
Over 70 people attended the program across two sessions, and we had really positive conversations. One main goal was to contextualize contemporary housing issues in our local history and draw connections between past and present. With the help of Jenny DeRocher, Archives Librarian at the public library, we explored dozens of primary sources from the last 150 years on issues like homelessness, Sundown Town history, racism in housing, opposition to housing developments, and more.
After reflection and discussion on these sources, we shared specific action items categorized as educate, act, and advocate. Heneghan sent out four follow up emails each week after the event with a deeper dive into a particular topic and related actions.
Zoning came up in both sessions of the event as a key piece to solving our housing crisis. Our crew of collaborators is very interested in BOTH hosting this event again for other audiences AND creating new iterations of it that dig into exclusionary zoning and all that good stuff.
Requests from Heneghan:
- Suggestions for actions, especially how people can get involved in local government
- Folks interested in participating in community education around zoning and future educational programming
- Any groups/orgs/businesses that would be interested in bringing Then + Now to their space