HOME Line’s VISTA program was created to more directly address housing instability and other housing issues tenants experience by providing organizing support to local nonprofits and neighborhood associations. The VISTA project seeks to build, maintain, and improve formal and informal networks of low-income renter households to better address housing quality, instability, and affordability issues in a variety of geographic and culturally-based communities throughout the Twin Cities Metro area.
HOME Line’s partnerships with a variety of local housing and social-service stakeholders throughout the metro helps connect tenants to resources and organizing supports that can positively influence their efforts to improve and/or preserve their homes. Past and current partners are typically nonprofits or local neighborhood associations seeking to build out their tenant organizing capacity. At the beginning of 2023, our two host sites included Housing Justice Center and Whittier Alliance. Host sites for our 2023-24 program year include: Phillips West Neighborhood Organization, St. Anthony Park Community Council & Hamline Midway Coalition, Whittier Alliance, Housing Justice Center, and South Minneapolis Anti-Racism Collective (Bryant Neighborhood Organization and Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association).
This year also included the start of a training share program between the HOME Line VISTA Program and 4 other area VISTA Cohorts. This group is made up of 5 programs that each have unique trainings to contribute, and we have been sharing these trainings as a cohort as in-kind donations to each other. These topics include tenant rights (HOME Line), digital literacy (LiteracyMN), grant writing (Minnesota Council of Nonprofits), youth voice/youth & adult partnerships (MN Alliance with Youth), and The Social Change Wheel (Iowa and Minnesota Campus Compact).
With the support of the $40,000 Housing Stability Program Grant from the Alliance, we were able to build out a robust, two month onboarding curriculum that included engaging 12 internal HOME Line Staff trainers, 2 HOME Line VISTA Program Alumni, and 7 outside community members, including Juan Luis Rivera Reyes (The Alliance), Ricardo Levins Morales, Ned Wik Moore & Malik Holt-Shabazz (U of M CURA Program), Ashley Oolman (Allied Folk), HUGE Improv, and Kara Lallman (Sangsaeng LLC). In addition, this funding allowed our host sites to pay only half the usual program fee this year, and gives each of our VISTA Cohort Members a pool of resources to put towards meeting accessibility needs, translation or interpretation services, or providing tenant leader stipends.
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