Our Housing Cause Collaborative: Sharing Takeaways and Action Steps

In late October 2024, Activate Good and Leadership Triangle began gathering a group of housing leaders — mostly from the nonprofit sector — to uncover key barriers to regional collaboration across the Triangle.

Together, we’ve unpacked a lot. Here are some of the key takeaways and our collective action steps.

Takeaway #1: Housing-focused organizations need strong and effective referral systems to support individuals across the spectrum of housing needs, from homelessness to market-rate home ownership. Often, people in our community reach out to the first nonprofit they know, and that nonprofit may or may not be able to support their needs.

Action Steps:

• We built an online referral directory for housing nonprofits across Orange, Durham, and Wake County.
• We strengthened relationships between housing nonprofit leaders to increase awareness of service availability across the region.

Takeaway #2: Community members need accessible language to advocate for housing solutions. Housing can be a technical and acronym-heavy industry.

Action Step:

• We drafted language that any community member can use to advocate for housing solutions. Feel free to c/p this messaging and use it at your next City Council meeting!

Housing is foundational to economic development. The Triangle needs significant additional resources to expand housing solutions — from alleviating homelessness to building affordable market-rate homes. This requires streamlined, flexible processes at the local, county, and state levels that remove barriers and reduce bureaucracy.

Takeaway #3: Because of the nature of state and federal funding, it is hard for housing nonprofits to collaborate across counties. This leads to a lack of scalable innovation.

Action Step:

• Private philanthropy can step into the gap to fund innovative projects that go across county lines or are replicated in each county of the Triangle.
• County-based continuum of care leaders are encouraged to work together to share information, resources, best practices, and key learnings.

Takeaway #4: Too often, private sector leaders with a stake in housing (e.g. real estate agents, lenders) are not aware of the needs of housing nonprofits. Nonprofits do not have the capacity to reach out or build collective understanding of the issue, and thus, a large market of invested but untapped potential remains.

Action Step:

• We want to try to help “be” that capacity for these incredible nonprofits! Leadership Triangle and Activate Good are calling all private sector leaders who are housing-adjacent, within the industry, or who care deeply about housing to join us for collective learning over the next few months. We’ll help get you plugged into housing work across the Triangle, and bring you into conversation with 20+ Housing nonprofits doing incredible work.

If you are interested in joining the private-sector housing collaborative, please sign up via this form.