NLIHC is currently recruiting members for the 2023-2024 Tenant Leader Cohort. The Cohort is a group of tenant advocates and community leaders with lived experience of housing insecurity who work toward housing justice and racial equity in their neighborhoods and greater communities. NLIHC collaborates with the Tenant Leader Cohort to inform our policy priorities so that they best reflect the needs of low-income renters. To express your interest in joining the 2023-2024 Cohort, please fill out this interest form. We also invite you to register for the next Tenant Leader Cohort Interest Meeting on June 10 at 11:00 am ET.
NLIHC launched the inaugural Tenant Leader Cohort in 2022. The group is made up of resident advocates across the country who have been involved with NLIHC’s federal housing policy advocacy in the past, as well as those who are newer to NLIHC’s work and mission but who have been advancing the goal of housing justice in their own communities. In October 2022, NLIHC convened its first Tenant Leader Retreat in Albany, Georgia, where members focused on racial trauma and healing and helped formulate tenant protection policy priorities and ideas for NLIHC’s most recent Housing Policy Forum, held in March of this year.
- In November 2022, members of the Tenant Leader Cohort were invited to participate in a White House conversation on tenant protections. They were joined by other people with lived experience, legal aid providers, advocates, and researchers. At the meeting, tenant leaders were able to provide feedback on the policies in place that affect their communities and suggest ways to improve tenant protections and advance housing equity.
- During the NLIHC Housing Policy Forum in March, several Tenant Leader Cohort members took part in a fireside chat with HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge. They shared with Secretary Fudge, the Cohort’s top policy priorities for the federal government, including fair housing, environmental justice, addressing veteran homelessness, broadening mental health services, pursuing eviction prevention, and strengthening Section 3 to expand economic opportunities for tenants.
If you are interested in becoming a part of NLIHC's 2023-2024 Tenant Leader Cohort, please fill out this interest form. Selections for the cohort will be made on an ongoing basis through early summer 2023.
Read more about the Tenant Leader Cohort retreat here.
Read more about the Tenant Leader Cohort’s visit to the White House here.
Applications for the 2023-2024 school year at the Village on Mercy’s Bezos Academy are due on June 5. The school will then conduct a lottery of applicants on June 6, and families accepted to the school will be notified by June 12. Families earning up to 400% of the federal poverty level (up to $120,000 annually for a family of four) with children who are between three and four years old years as of September 1, 2023, are eligible to apply. Families interested in applying are encouraged to visit the school’s website here.