Meets Weekly @ Elevate Church, 191 N. Victory Drive Saturdays in April & May from 10am - 11:30am Affordable Housing Collaborative is a grassroots community effort, working together to create the quality of life we deserve in the place that we live and love. The expert team is made up of individuals with firsthand experience of life in low-income housing, shelter systems, or have had or are currently experiencing homelessness. You are an expert of your experience and we need you! Check out our Facebook page! Come join us for our next meeting! We’re working on creating the solutions we need with the resources we have - this is how change gets done!

www.facebook.com/AffordableHousingCollaborative

Expert Team Meeting Affordable Housing Collaborative

Expert Team Meeting Affordable Housing Collaborative Harvest from Team Meeting on Saturday, April 5th, 2014 Page 1 of 3

We went around in circle, getting acquainted with each other - shared our stories, where we came from and what brought us here. We started our check-in with how we were feeling - what our personal goals for the meeting were, who we were going to ask for help in reaching that goal and what we’d commit to in helping to make it happen. This process helped us all fully arrive as we sipped on delicious coffee donated from the Coffee Hag and enjoyed the comfortable meeting space that Elevate Church had provided us.

Goals that we identified during our check-in that we want to learn more about: ~Folks are experiencing housing needs - finding housing~Looking for partnerships - networking, community~Needing to find resources - up-to-date information, the difference between “handouts” vs. empowerment~Wanting to build some momentum to address the lack of availability, what are the zoning laws/rules around this? ~Addressing the cost of living ~Action and education to build more awareness about what we’re working on, invite more to people to join us

We discovered our common values. Brainstorming, we asked ourselves: When push comes to shove, what VALUES do we refuse to budge on? Some were surprised by the similarities guiding our moral compasses:

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What are the most important, most urgent issues and challenges that we are facing at this time? !

#1. Income-based, affordable, available housing that has room for large family units, which is environmentally friendly, which creates a healing environment and encourages physical activity; and which provides us with long-term consistency that is accessible along transportation routes - we need this now.

!#2. Grievance Councils can promote self-advocacy, improve tenant knowledge of their rights and awareness of issues, create more transparent coordination and communication between tenants, local officials and landlords. Landlords must stop overcharging for repairs, particularly for Normal Wear & Tear they are legally obliged to fix themselves. Landlords must stop evicting tenants without getting all of the relevant information first, particularly when tenants face arrest for issues not related to the landlord's property.

!#3. Safety and security needs improvement. Landlord communication must be standardized and walk-throughs should be supervised with 24 hours prior notification to tenants before any entry into the home.

!#4. Racial and class discrimination causes daily harm to minority people and single men in our community. This abuse violates Equal Housing Opportunity Regulations, and the spirit of our community and our country.

!#5. The trauma of this housing crisis has compromised our health and well-being, some members of our community suffer severe complications from the unending strain of never knowing where they will sleep, what they will do, or how they’ll survive from one day to the next.

We continued to brainstorm and prioritize some more…

We then made commitments to follow-through on next steps, to take action - people stepped up and stepped in to commit to the following:

~co-lead the next meeting

~print and distribute fliers for the meetings

~pass this along to their church

~pass this along to ECHO Food Shelf

~pass this along to the Blue Earth County Library

~pass this along to the folks at the Salvation Army

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We believe that we have what we need, right here, right now to begin deciding our next steps - so we created a list of the resources we each bring to the table and this is what we discovered:

~We are gifted at networking, writing, communication and generating ideas

~We speak multiple languages

~We have strong education experience and backgrounds (GIS mapping, Mental Health professional and client experience, many people in the room have years of community development and community organizing experience!)

~We are advocates

~We have a valuable perspective and life experience to guide our progress

~We have relationships with multiple nonprofit and faith-based community groups and community organizations along with state and local elected officials

~We are motivated to create the change we need