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Dear members, partners, friends, and allies,
I’m thrilled to inform you that NLIHC has received a $15 million donation from MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving! This gift is an extraordinary testament to our collective reach and impact and will provide transformative stability and resources for NLIHC to further expand both. All of us at NLIHC are deeply appreciative of the opportunity this donation provides to deepen, strengthen, and advance our collective work towards housing justice. This is the largest financial gift in NLIHC’s 49-year history.
The donation comes at a crucial time. By nearly all measures, the housing crisis has worsened for the lowest-income and most marginalized people. Opponents of humane and proven solutions are building power in local communities and nationally. Evictions and homelessness are increasing, disasters worsening, and political divides deepening.
Yet together, we’ve made great strides toward housing justice in recent years – expanding our partnerships and coalitions, amplifying impacted people, centering racial justice, and advancing solutions to get and keep the lowest-income people stably, accessibly, and affordably housed.
Together, we made historic progress in having housing and homelessness featured in the last presidential campaign. We achieved unprecedented federal resources and protections for renters and people experiencing homelessness during the pandemic. We’ve enacted nearly 250 new state and local tenant protections and advanced dozens of ballot initiatives for increased protections and resources. We’ve deepened our work towards racial equity, supported and amplified tenant leaders, expanded our multisector partners, advanced solutions for equitable and complete disaster housing recovery and rebuilding, and continued to build bipartisan support and champions for the long-term solutions needed to achieve housing justice through research, communications, organizing, and advocacy.
Now, with tremendous need, momentum, partnerships, and allies, we will use the donation from MacKenzie Scott to strengthen, deepen, and expand our impact.
This transformative gift – combined with the ongoing, critical support of other key foundations, donors, and partners – allows us to strengthen NLIHC, deepen and expand our collective partnerships and campaigns, and build the political will needed to advance our long-term policy solutions and achieve housing justice. With these new resources, we will, in addition to other ongoing efforts:
- Advance racial justice by expanding our IDEAS initiative for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Anti-Racism, and Systems thinking.
- Support, engage, and amplify the leadership of tenants and other impacted people.
- Strengthen our nonpartisan Our Homes, Our Votes campaign to close the voter turnout gap and push political candidates and policymakers to further prioritize housing.
- Expand state/local innovation to strengthen tenants’ rights, prevent and end homelessness, and build an evidence-base for long-term federal solutions.
- Expand our work to ensure equitable and complete disaster housing recovery and climate resilience for the lowest-income and most marginalized people/communities.
We’ll have much more to say and share about each of these expanded initiatives in the coming weeks, months, and years. As always, we look forward to your continued partnership in the work!
In this season of thankfulness and giving, I am filled with gratitude and appreciation – for this transformative and generous gift from MacKenzie Scott, for all our donors and supporters, for the outstanding team at NLIHC, for the tremendous dedication, skill, and effective advocacy of our partners, and for our collective resolve and determination to end homelessness and housing poverty, once and for all. Together, we are NLIHC. And, together, we will achieve housing justice.
Onward.