MISSION
Making Housing & Community Happen equips congregations, community leaders, and neighbors with practical tools needed to transform their communities to end homelessness, and to stabilize the cost of housing through education, advocacy, organizing, and advisement.
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Education: One-day Housing Justice Institutes offer workshops, course work, and speaking engagements to connect congregations with key staff, affordable housing developers, becoming familiar with US and local affordable housing policies, biblical land use principles, and visualize community assets.
Advocacy: The Affordable/Supportive Housing Advocates (ASHA), equips advocates with strategies and tools needed to do research, reflection, and action on behalf of housing justice and community transformation.
Organizing: By emphasizing love to God, neighbor, community, and self, we nurture our leaders to engage relationally with their community. With this partnership, we are able to personally hear the concerns, stories, and dreams of our neighbors.
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Our North Fair Oaks Empowerment Initiative has an organizer who is working with the residents of this area around their concerns based on: the work of interns and organizers over an 8-year period; numerous listening sessions; and two surveys, one in 2015 to 150 residents and church members, and in 2021 sent out to 1,000 households in collaboration with the city of Pasadena. Their concerns are the following: to slow traffic, creating safety for cars and pedestrians; to make more affordable possible with a "right to return" from displacement of African Americans; to restore a once thriving Black "Main Street"; and to beautify the area from Washington Blvd to the city border. To learn more, go to the North Fair Oaks Empowerment Initiative page.
To listen to the community and to pass policies and projects, we mobilize the faith communities and partners, to learn more: Allies and Partners
Advisement: Our Congregational Land Committee offers professional advisors to empower churches to have affordable housing on their land. The discernment process entails creating a site plan, overviewing financial feasibility, conducting community input, and collaborating with an affordable housing development partner to create and manage the housing project.
OUR LOGO
The “vine and fig tree” motif in our logo is a reference to Micah 4:3-4. This biblical passage inspires our vision that everyone is to have decent, safe, and affordable housing.
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3 “He will arbitrate among the nations and dictate to strong nations far away. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nations shall no longer fight each other, for all war will end. There will be universal peace, and all the military academies and training camps will be closed down.”
Living Bible (TLB)
4 “All will sit underneath their own grapevines, under their own fig trees. There will be no one to terrify them; for the mouth of the LORD of heavenly forces has spoken.”
Common English Bible (CEB)
The prophet Micah foresaw a time when God would arbitrate peace and end war (a major cause of homelessness and displacement) and swords would be beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks—weapons of war would be turned into implements of agriculture because war is no longer needed. It is then assumed that in God’s vision, “All will sit underneath their own grapevines, under their own fig trees. There will be no one to terrify them.”
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These passages from Scripture are worth meditating and reflecting upon as we seek to do our work for housing justice:
2 Kings 18:31 (CEB); Isaiah 36:16 (CEB); 2 Kings 4:25 (CEB); Zechariah 3:10 (CEB); James 3:11-13 (CEB)
CLICK BELOW for an overview of land use in the Bible.