Housing is a Human Right: A Conversation with Amanda Andere
Our country is facing one of the most severe affordable housing crises in history. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, no state has an adequate supply of affordable rental housing for the lowest income renters, with only 37 affordable and available rental homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter household. That means nearly 8 million extremely low-income households pay at least half of their income toward housing, putting them at risk of housing instability and homelessness.
Amanda Andere has seen the housing and homelessness sector from every angle. She’s worked in direct service, advocacy, and development, and is now the chief executive officer of Funders Together to End Homelessness, an organization that seeks to organize and push funders to focus on systemic change and housing justice.
Amanda sat down with Raikes Foundation Executive Director Dennis Quirin to talk about reimagining housing as an essential component of justice and treating it as a human right rather than a commodity. The number of people experiencing homelessness each year in America is on the rise, and Amanda argues that the greatest risk we face right now is going small and tweaking policies rather than seizing an opportunity to completely reimagine the systems that support communities.
Amanda’s conversation with Dennis, lightly edited for clarity, is below.
Dennis Quirin
I think maybe we should start with some of the basics. What is Funders Together to End Homelessness? What’s your mission and purpose, and how did you come into being?
Amanda Andere
Funders Together to End Homelessness is a national network of philanthropy, United Ways, corporations, and individual donors who for the last 11 years have come together with the purpose of preventing and ending homelessness. But we’ve evolved in the last 11 years. We started as an organization that wanted to change the narrative around housing and how we end homelessness, bring a “housing first” approach into the sector, and challenge communities around permanent supportive housing.
The funders who started Funders Together knew that they could do that through influence and through resources, but what they found was that there were funders across the country who were seeing this growing housing and homelessness crisis who wanted to come together and learn from each other and connect. They really wanted to avoid trying to start another organization, but ended up starting Funders Together because of that need. An important part of our journey is that we have always focused on systems change. And five years ago, we realized that the system is actually working exactly as it was designed, and we had to start to center racial equity. Now we are moving towards being an organization that leads with racial and housing justice as a way to prevent and end homelessness.
Dennis Quirin
What brings you to this work? Why are you drawn to the work on homelessness and why do you think pushing and organizing funders is crucial to that work?
Amanda Andere
I’ve always been in the space of housing and homelessness, mostly through direct service organizations. When I was running direct service organizations, I was very involved in policy and advocacy. I actually came into the space as a grantseeker and as a development person, because when I was on the Hill, I was super curious about why we were only getting one type of organization that was doing policy and advocacy. And then I realized direct service organizations don’t have the resources to do that work, but that they’re the closest to the problem. People with lived expertise have always had this desire to create policy and advocacy spaces that were diverse.
I have realized that philanthropy is at the core of how we move systems. And I come to this work with a deep belief that I don’t want to live in a community where everyone doesn’t have housing as a human right, where people can’t live where they want to live and live how they want to live, and I come to this work thinking, knowing that organizing philanthropy is not the end all, but it’s the first step in how we get to housing justice when we resource communities to be able to affect change.
Dennis Quirin
You’ve been a big part of shifting the housing and homelessness sector away from a focus on crisis response and toward root causes, like systemic racism. How do you help an entire field start to see racial justice as core to its purpose and mission? What did it take and what can we learn about how to push other fields?
Amanda Andere
I get this question a lot, and I always joke and say, the racial inequities that we’re seeing in the housing system have been living on HUDs website for 20 years, right? The data has been really, really clear. But, when I started five years ago, especially as a Black woman new to philanthropy, I didn’t think that I was going to start changing Funders Together to be an organization more centered on racial justice and racial equity.
What’s really interesting is at the time, my mostly white board and all white staff were the ones who had been doing the work before I got there and said, if we are not doing racial equity, we’re not ending homelessness. That was day two of me starting. And so, I started to work with some others who were looking at the data and who were just listening to community and realized that if we weren’t talking about racial equity, we weren’t ending homelessness. And we just started to have those discussions, bring forth the data, and make space for people with lived expertise or people who had been in the field. A lot of Black and brown and indigenous case workers who knew that they were seeing not just huge disproportionalities, but all the ways that the system was treating people of color unfairly. And so using my platform and my voice and bringing others to the table was really helpful in not only changing Funders Together, but changing the way that the movement looked at the racialized history of our country, especially as it pertains to housing.
That’s how we started. We just started having discussions. It was really hard. I think it made people feel uncomfortable, but it was necessary for people to start doing some reflection and sit in bold spaces and uncomfortable spaces in order to realize that the system was working to oppress Black and brown folks.
Dennis Quirin
You’ve also been upfront pushing the housing and homelessness sector to shift its thinking in another big way. Funders Together is advocating for the field to think about housing as a human right and entitlement rather than a market-based commodity. Can you tell me more about what that shift actually means, what it unlocks, and why you think that’s essential to ending homelessness?
Amanda Andere
A lot of our work in the housing and homelessness field has been focused on ending someone’s homelessness, and that is super important, but what does that mean? It often means, because housing is a commodity in our country, moving someone further and further away from resources, whether that be career opportunities, transportation, green space, their own community. And obviously it’s good that people are housed — we don’t want people living on the street, and we don’t want people living in their cars. But housing justice asks us to start to repair and reform the systems that necessitate people just moving to the next place.
To think of housing as a human right, to think of housing and justice together, means people get to decide where they live, how they live, what community safety looks like to them, and what their community should be.
We have this idea that proximity to whiteness equals success. And for me, when we think of housing as a human right and housing justice, we should be talking about how communities have been historically and intentionally disinvested in and how we now invest in them, with those community members leading. And so that’s the shift that we’re trying to make in the movement. It’s not just about ending homelessness, it’s about justice and repair, and quite frankly, I think reparations for the harm that’s been done.
Dennis Quirin
Homelessness has become so much more visible. It’s on people’s minds in cities across the country. It’s tied to trends around economic disparity, the cost of living, housing affordability, and so many others that can lead to homelessness. Are you beginning to see philanthropy and advocates in the fields understand the issue of homelessness differently?
Amanda Andere
Well, yes and no. I am still fighting the good fight to get people to understand that homelessness is a structural problem, not a people problem. I enter a lot of spaces with people who are doing work on affordable housing, on community development, and when I say homelessness, they are like, “Oh, we don’t do homelessness, we do housing.” Or will say things like, “oh, you know, what can we do to actually solve homelessness?”
And what they’re really saying is they have this image of homelessness of that person on the street, of substance use, of mental health issues. And those things can be true, but we also know a lot of people in our lives that deal with those same issues and are housed. And so the issue is housing. Housing solves homelessness. Homelessness is a structural problem. I see a lot more funders and people in philanthropy starting to understand that if they’re an education funder, if they’re a health funder, if they’re working to reform the criminal legal system, that housing has to be the center. That we can’t do any of those things without people having stable housing in a community that’s going to support them.
And I see folks coming around to that, but I think where they get stuck is, well, how do we get there, right? And how do we solve an issue that feels so intractable? And that’s why Funders Together and our members are so critical because we can be a voice to say this is not an intractable problem. This is a problem that we can solve when we break down our own silos in philanthropy, as well as it’s a problem that means that we have to change. We can’t just be funding programs; we actually have to be funding policy and organizing and engaging in activism, because we know that public private partnership, the federal government, and our systems need to change in order for us to have housing as a human right and to have housing justice.
Dennis Quirin
We are living through unprecedented times where opinions on not only race and equity are shifting rapidly, but also the social safety net and conventional wisdom on what the government owes its people and what we owe each other. And so I’m curious, given the times we’re in, what risks do you see in our current moment and what gives you hope?
Amanda Andere
Well, I think there’s a couple of risks. I think that there’s a risk in us just tweaking, tinkering around the edges, and not really starting to have the tough conversations about abolition, about reform and what that actually means. And I think that’s because the issues around structural racism and being anti-racist still feel deeply personal and they feel interpersonal.
We often look to symbolic gestures in order to correct years of injustices rather than sitting deeply with the history of this country. To me, the risk in philanthropy is in all of our work going toward symbolic gestures. Like having more diverse people with lived expertise is good and necessary, but are we listening to them and turning over power to them? That’s the big risk for me.
My hope is that for the first time in my lifetime, and I think in other people’s lifetime, the streets are talking louder than the people in power. Our job as people in power is to create a place for those voices. And I hear a lot more people, not just talking about equity and inclusion, but talking about giving up power, turning over resources and understanding that the resources belong to community. That is what gives me hope in our work.
Dennis Quirin
Any parting thoughts for philanthropy?
Amanda Andere
I think this is super important. We need to every day as philanthropy question our existence, question where our resources come from, and who they rightfully belong to. And if we’re not trying to dismantle ourselves, if we’re just saying we’re going to fund the work without really uprooting ourselves, then we’re not doing justice work. And that will be lifetime work. We might not see the dismantling and rebuilding of structures in our lifetime, but we have to start thinking to that end. That’s super hard, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s necessary.
