On the Home Front

Advocacy is about changing the world for the better – but it can change you for the better, too.

Take it from Deanna Nagle, a tenant advocate and NLIHC member. In a recent blog post, Deanna recounts her experience at a city council budget meeting. When first asked by a local housing group to make her voice heard at the meeting, Deanna confesses that she “could barely contain the hurl.” But her conscience won out: she showed up, spoke up, and told her story, even while doubting whether it would make any difference. After she spoke, “the council took a sudden break, then returned and suggested our meeting was over, but the constituents that had formed behind me during my testimony stayed. All 90 people testified at that mic, ending the meeting just before midnight.” In the end, Deanna explains, “I’m glad I listened to my ‘gut’ and told the truth that day…I didn’t know if what I said changed a thing, but on that final exhale, one certainty was sure: it’d changed ME.”

As Deanna’s story makes clear, advocacy is about a lot more than policy change. Like any project worth pursuing, it’s a journey that can branch outward in any number of directions. You drag yourself to a boring budget meeting one night – why not? – and speak your piece, only to find that you’ve galvanized the room, reframed the public conversation, charged your life with new purpose. What begins randomly – a friend’s invitation to stop by a meeting at the neighborhood’s elementary school – ends five years later with you sitting on the school board, hashing out the details of a new spending plan. While attending a letter-writing party to your elected officials, you meet your future business partner, or the love of your life, or just a bunch of local weirdos. You don’t really know what will happen – which is why it’s exciting.

What’s for sure is that advocacy makes you part of a community. Showing up to a city council meeting can fire you with purpose, or it can leave you cold. Either way, though, you’re bound to meet some interesting people and have some memorable conversations. You’ll almost certainly encounter a community of more or less like-minded folks brought together by a shared vision and unique energy. If you’re anything like Deanna, you may end up inspiring them to action, becoming a leader, even reshaping your career. But at the very least, you’re going to make lots of new connections, and probably a few new friends – all while reminding your elected officials about whom they work for.

So how do you get started in housing advocacy? It may come as no surprise that we have some ideas.

In fact, you’re in luck, because this is one of the best times to get involved in federal-level housing advocacy. In August, members of Congress leave their offices in D.C. to return to their home districts and states. Known as “August recess,” the time is used by elected officials to attend meetings in their communities and hear from their constituents about the issues impacting them. For this reason, August recess is the perfect time for advocates to weigh in with their elected officials, including by scheduling in-district meetings with members, inviting members of Congress to tour affordable housing developments or homelessness programs, and using social media to amplify messages and stories about the importance of these programs.

Our newly released Congressional Advocacy Toolkit provides tips to help you get started, as well as key resources you can use when trying to build support for the kind of large-scale, sustained investments we need in order to address the affordable housing and homelessness crisis. These resources include talking points regarding how to promote homelessness programs like Housing First and support increased funding through the federal budget, as well as storytelling tips and tricks, social media messages, guidance on how to host site visits and conduct in-district meetings, and more.

The upcoming month is an especially exciting time to get involved because Congress is in the process of finalizing next year’s budget for housing and homelessness programs. With the House and Senate spending bills released, congressional appropriators will now turn their attention to reaching a compromise funding bill with the bipartisan support that will be required for the bills to pass both chambers. Thanks to the hard work of advocates across the country, who mobilized throughout the spring and early summer to weigh in with their elected officials, HUD’s vital rental assistance, homelessness assistance, and tribal housing programs were spared from cuts in both the House and Senate bills. Yet we still have work to do to ensure these funding levels remain in a final bill and that other critical programs, such as Public Housing, are also fully funded. (For more details about the House and Senate proposals, see NLIHC’s analysis of the Senate bill, our analysis of the House draft spending bill, and a budget chart.)

Which is where you come in! We urge you to make your voice heard by telling Congress that it cannot balance the federal budget at the expense of people with the lowest incomes. In addition to exploring the resources in the new toolkit, we have a few other ideas to help you get started advocating for the most possible funding for housing and homelessness programs.

• Contact your senators and representatives to urge them to expand – not cut – investments in affordable, accessible homes through next year’s spending bill, including for NLIHC’s top priorities:
  • Implementing full funding for the Tenant-Based Rental Assistance (TBRA) program to renew all existing contracts.
  • Providing full funding for public housing operations and repairs.
  • Fully funding homelessness assistance grants.
  • Providing $100 million for legal assistance to prevent evictions.
  • Funding a permanent Emergency Rental Assistance program.
  • Maintaining funding for competitive tribal housing grants for tribes with the greatest needs.
• Relatedly, you can join over 2,000 organizations by signing your organization on to a national letter from the Campaign for Housing and Community Development Funding (CHCDF), calling on Congress to oppose budget cuts and instead to support the highest level of funding possible for affordable housing, homelessness, and community development resources in 2024.

We know that this sort of budget advocacy pays off. It was thanks to the tireless efforts of advocates around the country last year that Congress was persuaded to raise HUD’s budget by $8.1 billion for 2023, ensuring not only that all existing Housing Choice Voucher and Project-Based Rental Assistance contracts would be renewed but that 12,000 additional households receive housing vouchers.

Now, we must ensure that housing and homelessness programs receive the most possible funding when Congress returns from recess in September, when what is sure to be a challenging appropriations process begins in earnest. Your advocacy will be vital in this effort.

And you’ll probably make at least a few friends in the process.