Newsletters
| Economic & Community Development, Housing
Newsletters
| Economic & Community Development, Housing, Transit & Infrastructure
- Newsletters
- | Economic & Community Development, Housing, Transit & Infrastructure
Typically, a 20-minute transit delay causes annoyance and anxiety. For participants in CFON’s Housing Cohort, facilitated by Accelerator for America, it was a highlight of their in-person retreat, something they mentioned repeatedly and excitedly. The delay wasn’t caused by a flat tire or late bus but by a woman who wanted to heap praise on the Chicago Community Trust staff and the program that helped invest in her block and fund needed home repairs for her and other local residents.
The interaction emphasized the power of community foundations developing personal relationships within the neighborhoods they work. Built on AFA’s work through the National Housing Crisis Task Force, the yearlong Housing Cohort gave ten community foundations a stronger grounding in the roles they can play in supporting housing creation and affordability in their communities.
The lessons that emerged during the cohort’s work:
Community foundations can serve as neutral conveners to bring together local elected leaders across a broader region, private foundations, business leaders, community, elected and other stakeholders to pursue policy change and build a pro-housing coalition. For example, the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta was integral in helping establish and grow House ATL, a regionwide collaborative that helps assemble capital and promote policies to increase housing production and affordability. The Rhode Island Foundation was instrumental in helping support the state’s $120 million housing bond in 2024. Many foundations in the cohort are exploring opportunities like these to engage more deeply with local elected, business, and philanthropic leaders.
As featured in our State and Local Housing Action Plan, many community foundations are already finding ways to creatively deploy capital into housing developments beyond traditional grants. San Diego Foundation and Atlanta have launched large impact investment funds that are actively investing directly into affordable and workforce housing developments — a much more active role in housing production than philanthropy has traditionally played. Many of the participating foundations were interested in learning from and adapting these models to their own communities. One participating foundation is actively engaging private philanthropy to investigate the possibility of launching a similar fund to support housing production in its local market.
Local context is extremely critical. While the foundations shared a common interest in engaging more deeply in supporting housing production and affordability, there were major differences in their levels of capacity, as well as local housing needs. For example, the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation serves a larger and more rural geographic footprint; it must adapt programs and strategies for smaller communities where developer, workforce, and financing capacity is much lower than large and mid-sized cities.
There is great power in adapting and scaling models from other communities and learning from their success and challenges. Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta shared how they were considering adapting programs featured in the cohort, including LISC-Jacksonville’s Heirs’ Property work, into their own initiatives.
“I enjoyed hearing about innovative examples from around the country and getting connected with those experts who have a different lens,” said one participant. “I also really valued the connections and relationships built between cohort participants, having other folks around the country (who are also operating in community foundation contexts) to bounce ideas off of and learn from was incredibly helpful.”
Learn More
In May, the National Housing Crisis Task Force released its Community Foundations Pro-Housing Playbook, a guide for community foundations to build pro-housing coalitions.
Amid the backdrop of frigid temperatures and an early season snowstorm, the in-person cohort retreat in Chicago created space for candid discussions about impact investing, policymaker engagement, and community relationship-building. Cohort participants also had the opportunity to visit two of Chicago Community Trust’s housing focused grantees: Unblocked Englewood and Reclaiming Chicago.
Unblocked Englewood is an award-winning initiative of the Chicago Bungalow Association that aims to build community and generational wealth through strategic home repairs, block beautification efforts, and public art installations. Englewood is a neighborhood on the west side of Chicago where large numbers of Black homeowners were forced to use predatory land sale contracts to acquire their homes in the 1950s and 1960s. Unblocked Englewood illuminates this discriminatory history while supporting home and small apartment owners.
Reclaiming Chicago aims to build 2,000 new, affordable homes on vacant lots in historically disinvested neighborhoods on the west and south sides of Chicago. The initiative, led by United Power for Action Justice, won the 2025 Chicago Prize from the Pritzker Traubert Foundation, a $10 million grant competition designed to fund innovative community investment and revitalization projects. The funding, in part, will support the development of 125 homes, a park, and a walking path in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood.
Community foundations, and locally focused philanthropy more broadly, are a powerful resource for local elected leaders to partner with in pursuing transformative housing, economic development, and community development initiatives. AFA is proud to have partnered with CFON and the ten participating foundations on this yearlong cohort and is planning to launch a second cohort in fall 2026.
Interested in connecting your philanthropic organization with local government leaders? Reach out to A.J. Herrmann at aj@acceleratorforamerica.org.
