The regional kitchen table is the foundation for creating, holding the possibility of change, and implementing a regional vision to prevent and end homelessness rooted in racial equity and housing justice.
Using transformative organizing to build the structure will help to bring together a diverse set of community stakeholders, pivot decision-making and governance away from white dominant culture norms, and support the behavioral and structural changes needed to pursue housing justice.
A regional goal and vision rooted in justice demands a new table or structure that can support changes in individual, group, and system behaviors, the organizing of and engaging of a diverse set of stakeholders, and the power sharing and decision-making necessary to move forward housing justice in the region. Often when communities think about what it will take to make significant shifts across stakeholders toward a common goal, they will use the terms “building a table” or “setting a table” where people can come together and make decisions.
In many professionalized settings, or system-oriented settings, this table is imagined to be, and operationalized to be one that feels more like a table in a boardroom than one in a kitchen. A boardroom table is one where business is conducted; “professional” norms are adhered to, and boundaries are upheld between the personal and professional selves for attendees. Many of the current tables in the Twin Cities Metro Region, including the 3 Continuum of Care (CoC), the Regional Metro Council (RMC), and the Metro Area Housing Coordination Board are orientated in this way. A kitchen table offers something different; a place where whole people commune together, meet their basic needs and their social emotional ones, and sometimes make decisions together. Transformative organizing is more like the kitchen table. It is not only a way to bring one’s whole self into collaborative work, but it is a way to force that collaborative work into dismantling structural oppression. To move towards housing justice the Twin Cities Metro Region needs to establish a regional kitchen table.
Creating this foundation will demand a new way of organizing and transformative organizing offers a framework for this new way forward. If the region moves forward with creating this new kitchen table it must remember that this type of organizing and foundation building is a long term goal. The goal of an initial launch by the start of 2022, if the community decides to proceed, should be seen as the preliminary table that can continue to grow in membership, decision-making, and activities over the course of the next 3-5 years.
Because the region is made up of a variety of separate entities making decisions about both policies/rules and money the first step should be to conduct a series of one-on-one stakeholder meetings in the Fall of 2021, led by the Regional Advisory Group. The engagements can help in understanding the needs of the various stakeholder, their interest in creating a new table, and their willingness to shift power over time to a table led by people with lived experience. These one-on-one stakeholder meeting should include those in the stakeholder map, including the 3 CoCs, the seven county human services offices making up the RMC, lived experience groups including, the Regional Expert Network, Freedom from the Streets, Voices for Change, and SMAC Director’s Council, and the Minnesota Interagency Council on Homelessness. After the Fall engagements, it will be critical for the community to make a decision by the end of the year to proceed in 2022 with a regional kitchen table in order to launch other major actions outlined in the Blueprint.
Transformative organizing is defined by its explicit intention to transform both those systems and the individuals engaged in those campaigns in an effort to win genuine liberation for all.
Steve Williams, Demanding Justice
Considerations on Behavior Changes and Structural Needs
Behavioral changes needed at the regional kitchen table
In order for Twin Cities Metro regionalization to be possible, the region will not only have to transform the kinds of people who are shoulder to shoulder planning, determining strategy, making decisions and implementing, but also the individuals in the region will have to transform themselves. So much so, that when the region thinks about who it is that will make justice a reality, it will have to understand that it is no longer someone else, but it is “us”. It is people experiencing housing instability and homelessness, it is people whose labor upholds the systems exacting harm. And as the region transforms the work together, the “us” are also transformed. See the resource section below for more information on what it means to transform the “us” around the kitchen table.
Transformative organizing offers not only a different way of doing things, but a different way of being while doing them. It means shifting away from the norms of white dominant culture, like power hoarding and comfort with predominantly white leadership, into authentic shared power and leadership of people who have experienced housing instability. In order for the Twin Cities Metro Region to achieve different results than prior efforts, the most recent example being the regional work on unsheltered homelessness, there has to be a shift in power. Power shifts in transformative organizing are rooted in democracy, meaning expertise comes from the power of people with different life experiences, skills and training, and decision-making processes have to accommodate the variance in the expertise. See the resource section below for more information on what it means to shift power and decision-making at a regional kitchen table through transformative organizing.
Structural needs of the regional kitchen table
At the same time that the regional kitchen table is working to change who they are in movement together, they have to focus on key stakeholder participation and make decisions about whose buy-in is essential for moving forward. Decisions about housing and homelessness are currently occurring at many different levels and across a variety of stakeholders. One-on-one engagements led by the Regional Advisory Group, with stakeholders in Fall 2021 could help to address the below considerations in the short-term, while longer term membership and governance is addressed in 2022 if the community decides to proceed with the Regional Kitchen Table.
Stakeholder Considerations
More immediate decisions will need to be made on which key governmental and community stakeholders to consider including in the launch of the regional kitchen table and which can be brought in over the course of the next year as the kitchen table is built out.
More immediate stakeholders to consider include:
- leadership members of the three CoC in the region,
- county human services officials,
- city human services officials that have direct allocation of city, state, or federal funds for homelessness and housing,
- prevention fund administrators,
- affordable and public housing developers and administrators,
- state office representatives like Department of Human Services (DHS) and Minnesota Housing,
- key lived experience groups, including the Regional Advisory Group for the Blueprint, the Regional Experts Network (REN), those with lived experience connected to the CoCs, and
- grassroots organizations, such as The Alliance, Metropolitan Urban Indian Directors, Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless (MCH) and Housing Justice Center.
Stakeholders that should be considered over the course of the next year include:
- land use and zoning board representatives,
- elected officials (city and county), and
- organizing/advocacy groups, such as the City of Lakes and Rondo Community Land Trusts and INQUILINXS UNIDXS POR JUSTICIA
The regional kitchen table must have clear connections to existing stakeholder tables including the RMC and Metro Area Housing Coordination Board, the 3 CoC governing boards, the Met Council, and the Minnesota Interagency Council on Homelessness (MICH). See the resource section below for more information on stakeholder considerations for the kitchen table.
Decision-making Considerations
In order for actions to move forward across the region there needs to be a transparent and reliable decision-making process that includes people across the stakeholder groups outlined, as well as people with lived expertise of housing instability and homelessness. The process should formalize responsibilities, roles, structure/organizing, communication, accountability, and the types of decisions that are included and excluded from the process. The decision-making process should also be clear about the integrity and accountability to the values and relational needs of the collective, as discussed above and decided upon.
Staffing the table effectively will help to ensure the table’s capacity to convene, hold the complex work, track the progress in an way that is accountable to the community, and continually nurture the process.
The level of transformative planning and decision-making being proposed for the regional kitchen table will require an investment in the staffing structure of the table. A common pitfall in many communities is underinvesting in system planning and the staffing and support it takes to move to community-based strategy creation and implementation. Through the interviews and workshops in the region, it was clearly articulated that the various existing tables, including the RMC and Housing Coordination Board, are in need of staffing capacity to do deeper strategic planning, to truly collaborate with people with lived experiences, and to look beyond the current crisis. The success of the regional kitchen table will be deeply connected the ability to support a comprehensive staffing structure. This structure should include:
- an investment in a transformative organizer
- compensated positions for people with lived experiences
- staffing capacity for key stakeholders
- experts from outside the regional kitchen table, when needed
Staffing Considerations
Invest in a transformative organizer
A table that is structured differently will also need an organizer that is trained to facilitate and partner differently. The region should consider looking to community organizers working within and outside of the homelessness field, one that can offer support in reorienting the key stockholders to a new way of showing up to the table and an new way of acting while around the table. The organizer should have lived experience of homelessness.
Center people with lived experience is the staffing structure
The staffing structure should center people with lived experience, both in the choosing of the organizer and in the broader staffing structure to ensure it is truly led by people with lived experience. This should include budgeting for people with lived experiences to be on workgroup and leadership bodies and for people with lived experiences to take leadership roles that will require more hours beyond participating in meetings. There are several established group of experts with lived experience in the region, including the Regional Advisory Group, the Regional Expert Network, and SMAC’s Director’s Council, that should help to develop these positions and potentially fill the positions.
Offer staff capacity to key stakeholders to engage in the table
Partnering stakeholders such as county and city human service offices, state agencies, providers, and community-based organizations often have little to no budget to support their staff in participating in system planning. Public and private funders in the region will need to develop strategies to support the capacity to participate which may include, operations budget support or embedding staff positions across key stakeholder.
Utilize experts when needed
It will be critical for the regional kitchen table to be organized and led by local leaders and experts. Those leaders and experts should have a clear process for identifying when expert support is needed from outside of the stakeholder participating a the table and local funders should have a clear process for supporting experts to come in for defined sets of work outlined by the regional kitchen table. This process should be led by the leadership of the table and not any single funder to ensure that experts being brought in are being done so under the decision-making structure of the table.
Developing a set of shared values will ground the regional kitchen table in housing justice, starting with the 3 values developed through the Blueprint community engagement.
Any structure or “table” that moves the region toward justice must be rooted in a set of shared values. In order to meaningfully establish shared values across the regional kitchen table, a process must be facilitated in which all values are respected and meaningfully assessed, and integrated into the regionalization process. Ongoing assessment of the regionalization process should not only measure success by quantitative goal setting, but also by evaluating performance against the established values of the decision-making at the kitchen table. While the established values need to be looked at as a meaningful metric of the project’s success, they should also be able to be reassessed and revised on a continuous basis. These shared values can be used to develop a regional vision. Through the Blueprint community engagement process, a set of shared values were established by over 150 workshop participants. These values could be further explored in the one-on-one engagements with stockholders in the fall of 2021 launch until longer-term membership and governance is established over the course of the 2022, whereupon more comprehensive values can be adopted and a vision statement drafted. These values can also be integrated into the way the initial membership of the regional kitchen table performs the system modeling and investment planning in proposed action 2. See the resource section for examples of regional efforts around the country and their values and vision statements.
Shared Values from Community Workshops
Center BIPOC, LGBTQ, and people experiencing homelessness in the regional vision and decision-making
Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) communities most affected by homelessness and housing insecurity must be at the center of the regional kitchen table’s decision-making. This means creating an environment in which members of these communities are comfortable and empowered enough to meaningfully collaborate, starting with open, honest conversation about needs and interests. If and when values are shared that differ from those shared by groups who have existing decision-making power, thoughts offered up by members of these communities need to be held in equal or greater regard. The entire regionalization process must be able to be meaningfully led by the contributions of these groups.
Moving away from scarcity and crisis decision-making to abundance and housing justice
As a part of the value-setting process, the regional kitchen table must establish a holistic approach to building housing justice, recognizing that it must encompass consideration of not only crisis response, but thorough plans for prevention and affordable housing throughout the region. Robust political will must be fostered to not only respond to the unsheltered crisis, but to the factors that prevent it and those that can sustain an end to it. As more resources are coming available from federal stimulus bills, state budgets, and private investments, it is critical to begin shifting away from making decisions on funding and priorities based on an extreme scarcity of resources and start looking at the new and existing resources more collectively to make more strategic decisions from a mindset of abundance.
Starting to dismantle the structural racism rooted in the creation and access of housing and services that leads to an urban/suburban divide
A system-wide familiarity with the history of racist housing practices locally and nationally, such as redlining, restrictive covenants, and segregation, must be established in order to meaningfully begin to dismantle and reverse its decades-long effects. Even now, a form of modern-day redlining contributes to Black and Indigenous people being essentially locked out of certain areas of the region due to the disproportionate amount of Black and Indigenous people experiencing homelessness and attempting to navigate services. As outlined in the system audit, Black and Indigenous people make up less than 15% of the Twin Cities’ population but account for 65% of all people experiencing homelessness – that inequality is the direct product of policies designed to produce such outcomes. Measurable and sustainable commitments must be made to dismantle the urban and suburban divide in how resources are accessed, starting by centering the input of those affected by these practices.
Setting regional goals will help address the prevention, crisis response, and affordable housing needs of the region through a race equity lens, while also addressing the quality of experience of people moving through the system.
The regional kitchen table must also be organized around a set of clearly defined regional goals. Ones that encompass all aspects of housing justice – prevention, crisis response, affordable housing, and that are connected to the set of shared values discussed above. These goals need to be broad reaching, long-term goals that can be broken into immediate and medium term goals/benchmarks as the region moves towards housing justice.
Strategies contained in Proposed Action 2 and 3 are examples of how to establish some of those immediate and medium term goals that can help move towards the larger goals that must be set, implemented, and held accountable by the table being formed. For example, regional system modeling outlined in Proposed Action 2 will help to establish more immediate goals on the types and amounts of housing needed in the region and can help to build towards the longer term regional goals on housing. The regional kitchen table can begin working on the more immediate goal setting in the regional system model at the start of 2022 while working through the building blocks outlined in this section that can lead to the establishment of more comprehensive, longer-term goals on housing justice in the first year of the Regional Kitchen Table.
Considerations for Setting Regional Goals
Set SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based
The regional kitchen table will need to establish goals as specific as possible to ensure both effective planning and effective measurement. The table will need to ensure these goals are reasonably accomplished within a given timeframe, though hold the plan with enough flexibility to allow for the complications that can come with huge system changes. A concerted and cooperative effort to ensure that regional goals being set are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based will be foundational to the table’s success.
Create a timeline
The regional kitchen table will need to set a timeline that is both reasonable and ambitious, tracking progress against the collectively agreed upon timeline. A process must also be in place to meaningfully prioritize tasks and establish timelines for each component of the plan. Ownership of each task must be established and continuously assessed, and members of the regional table must hold each other and the community accountable to the established timelines.
Measure and track progress against established values
Accountability mechanisms must be in place not only to track progress against measurable, time-based goals, but against the values established by the regional kitchen table. An assessment by the regional kitchen table on whether or not progress is embodying the set values will have to be thorough, intentional, and ongoing.
Implementing transparent accountability measures will help track progress on goals and ensure that progress is being seen equitably across Black, Brown, Indigenous, and LGBTQ communities.
Instituting a robust accountability system within the regional kitchen table will be essential to building a comprehensive regional vision and goals. After measurable goals are created, a system must be in place to track those goals. Progress must be continuously assessed by everyone at the table, starting with measuring achievement of goals against the initial values set by BIPOC and LGBTQ communities most affected by homelessness. This assessment must happen with input from the entire leadership team, and progress must be shared openly. The first attempt at accountability can be connected to the system modeling and investment planning strategy for the region that will be outlined in Proposed Action 2; helping to ensure that the recommendations of the modeling group are implemented. Longer term accountability measures can be developed over the coming year with the formation of the regional kitchen table.
Considerations for Moving to Transparent Accountability
Consider and pivot away from white dominate norms
In order to authentically track progress, an accountability process must be built that is inclusive of consideration of white dominant culture norms. Racial equity trainers define white dominant culture norms as “the explicit to subtle ways that the norms, preferences and fears of white European descended people overwhelmingly shape how we organize our work and institutions, see ourselves and others, interact with one another and with time, and make decisions.” Attention to countering these norms is particularly essential in an accountability process, where people’s visions for a transformed future are on the table, and the internal functioning of that decision-making table can heavily influence the project as a whole.
Some relevant norms to track might include:
- Power hoarding to power sharing
- Either/or thinking to systems and complexity thinking
- Fear of open conflict to direct and constructive feedback
- Progress is bigger, more to progress is sustainability and quality
- Rushed priorities and timelines to priorities and timelines set for sustainability and equity
Build out specific accountability mechanisms for individuals, the regional kitchen table, and for those with the power to implement the goals, including elected officials and government offices
Specific accountability mechanisms must be in place for each holder of a given goal – meaning that an open line of communication must be held at the CoC, county government, state office, and local organizing levels to track follow through on recommendations. Living into the values and practices needed to advance regionalization will require an approach to accountability that addresses and transforms individual, interpersonal and institutional bias. It is important to note here that taking action on addressing racist structures, policies and behaviors cannot wait for (predominantly white) individuals to do their individual work to understand internalized privilege and bias. Accountability on both the individual and institutional levels will be foundational to establishing an equitable, meaningful planning process.
An example of building these accountability measures for the system modeling and investment planning in Proposed Action 2 may include:
- Creating a leadership team and decision-making process for the modeling and investment planning that centers people with lived experience, with feedback loops to ensure true decision-making power
- Creating a clear process for review of recommendations by the 3 CoCs and the city, county, and state administrators of CoC, Emergency Solutions Grants, HOME, and state funds in the region to report back on the adoption or rejection of investment recommendations by those with the authority over the funding sources
Growing the political will and strategy on housing justice is critical to making the structural changes to policies related to land use, zoning, crisis response, housing development, and other critical areas.
The regional kitchen table will need to play a key role in building the political will and strategy to move the regional vision and should consider the following steps in buffing the political will and strategy. The first and most important step to address the structural barriers to address housing justice is to be clear about what the structural barriers are. Once the barriers are clear, the next step is to make the connections to the people and processes that govern and enforce those barriers. The third step is to develop the strategy and tactics needed to move people, policies and practice.
Way to take Action on the 3 Steps
Identify structural barriers to housing justice
It is helpful to think about what the categories of barriers are that keep the current structures in place. The categories elevated here are policies, practices, political/electoral drivers, and behavioral norms. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but a way to start thinking through each of the elements that present barriers. Examples of policy barriers include zoning and land use restrictions, targeted funding streams that limit use, and eroded tenancy rights. Examples of political and electoral barriers include timing of decisions needing to be made competing with an election cycle, regular turnover of political leadership. Examples of behavioral norms include meeting culture; underdeveloped capacity to be in conflict about ideas, particularly for white people in ideas/conversations pertaining to race; and discomfort with varied types of expertise (e.g. lived expertise versus scholarship versus job-developed expertise).
Conduct a political power mapping exercise to understand who (people) and how (processes) decisions are made regarding the barriers
There are many tools available to conduct a power analysis that maps key people and processes, and their relationships to influence and their proximity to support for housing justice, and your vision, values, and goals. See the resources section below for examples.
Develop the strategy and tactics needed to move people, policies and practice
In order to make progress against the barriers outlined, the region needs to develop both strategy and tactics that will begin shifts toward housing justice. These strategies and corresponding tactics will have to take into account the political realities of the region and have a plan of action to shift elected officials where it is not possible to move. Strategy and tactics will likely need to include:
- Considering different audiences and partners and how they need particular tactics (i.e. general public vs. knowledgeable stakeholders.)
- Considering your communications content (message) and the process needed to reinforce the narrative you are trying to shift
- Creating a targeted strategy that is political/electoral in nature, or determining alliances with similar strategies that may already exist. Based on power mapping, determine which current elected officials are onboard, which are movable and which are not, and respond accordingly. Do this in regular cycles to catch political shifts in the short term; and work to move the voter base in the long term