 Good. Well, welcome, everybody. How's everyone doing tonight? Good, good, or did night this evening? Thank you so much for coming out today. So I think a few more people are coming in, so we'll just wait a moment or two before we get started. But we're really grateful to see you all here today. And we're also grateful to CCTV town meeting television for recording this. So we'll be able to share it with other people. And when you're so excited after hearing the presentations and joining the discussion and you want to watch it again, you'll be able to. So are we good on your end? Perfect. Great. So hi. I'm Jess Hyman with the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, CVOEO. And it is my pleasure to be here today with all of you and with our wonderful speakers, Corinne Yance from CVOEO and Sarah Russell from CEDO and others, to celebrate Fair Housing Month. And as many of you may know, Fair Housing Month celebrates the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, which enshrined really essential protections into federal law to make sure that everyone could have equal access to housing choice and the opportunity to rent, buy, finance, and live in their homes free from discrimination or harassment. This country has a long history of separating people based on who they are, what they look like, the color of their skin, where they're from, their religion, who they love. The Fair Housing Act is intended to protect against discrimination in housing based on those characteristics and also go even further than that. So the Fair Housing Act didn't just make it illegal to treat people unfairly in their homes, but it also requires us all, requires governments at a federal level, state level, local level, and really all of us to do more than just not discriminate, but to take active steps to correct and repair the harm done by centuries of discrimination and segregation in this country. So when we talk about Fair Housing Month, this is an opportunity to raise awareness about the important protections that exist under federal and state law. And it's also an opportunity to pledge to do better and to make changes in our community to make sure that everyone is welcome, everyone belongs, and everyone can have a safe and affordable place to call home. So as we're promoting Fair Housing Month, I got a really good phone call a week or so ago from someone who said, hey, how can you celebrate Fair Housing? There are so many people who are struggling. There are so many people who don't have access to that basic human right that is a home. And she said, how could you possibly even talk about celebrating? And, well, I'll say what I said to her, that the reason that we celebrate is because we want to celebrate what's working. We want to celebrate what happens when communities are diverse, when they're inclusive, when everybody does have a home. And we also want to talk about all these issues in a positive way, because we can't make systemic change in our world, in our world, in our state, in our community here in Burlington. We can't make change without talking about it, without getting people all over the political spectrum, all over the age range and background, et cetera, involved in the conversation. Because as we talk about these important things and why it's so important, why home is so important, why where we live makes such a difference, then we can start making change. So, here we are, Fair Housing Month. Before I turn it over to Corinne, I need to thank the folks who have made these events possible because the Fair Housing Month events cover the whole state, there have been weeks of art activities, films, art exhibits, community discussions, and other events put on by a lot of different people and organizations. And I just want to take a moment to thank them because this is being recorded and we want to make sure that everyone gets the kudos that they deserve. So the key partners for Fair Housing Month activities are Burlington City Arts, Junction Arts and Media, ONE Art Center, Randolph Community Development Corporation, Rural Edge, Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition, Vermont Department of Housing and Community Development, Vermont Department of Libraries, Vermont Human Rights Commission, Vermont Legal Aid, Vital Communities, the White River Consortium, and our partners right here in the building, CEDO. We are so grateful to the City of Burlington and CEDO for being a partner in this Fair Housing work and also for sponsoring the delicious food that we're eating tonight from Saigon Kitchen, which is along the back, please help yourselves, there's lots to eat up, and also the free books in the back corner of the room are all provided by CEDO. So please take a look at the books, sign one out, and then keep an eye on your email for a book discussion later this spring or summer. Also on that table, we have Art Kits for the Heart and Home Art Project, which Karen's gonna be talking a lot more about in just a few moments, please take them home, share them with your family, they're good for kids, good for adults, and really a fun way to explore what home and community means. We have a number of very special sponsors who have made this possible, Feral Properties, Burlington's Office of Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, at CEDO of course, Redstone, Vermont State Housing Authority, Champlain Housing Trust, Ever North, Main Street Landing, Vermont Housing Finance Agency, Cathedral Square, Two Rivers Aduquici Regional Commission, Vermont Housing Conservation Board, and Palmer Low Properties, and we are grateful for all of them and especially grateful for all of you for being here tonight. So we're gonna hear from Karen Jantz, who is my colleague, friend, an amazing community artist, a housing advocate, and she's gonna talk about home and community and art, and then we'll hear from Sarah Russell from CEDO, who will talk about issues related to homelessness, and then we're gonna talk about what this all means and how talking about these issues, how thinking about our vocabulary of home can help us make a better place and make sure that everyone can have access to a safe and a stable and accessible and affordable place to call home. So thank you, and I'll turn it over to Karen. Hello, and just so you know, I really appreciate people eating food while they're here. It makes me feel less nervous about being on a podium, so please take care of your needs while you're here. And we're gonna be doing a lot of talking today, as in I'm gonna be doing a lot of talking and then we're all gonna talk together. And so this presentation is kind of a unique setup. For those who know me, know also that I am both a housing advocate working for the Fair Housing Project, we're part of the Housing Advocacy Program of CVOEO, the Champlain Valley of Economic Opportunity. I'm also an artist, and what I'm trying to feel out in this city hall this evening is my thesis for school. So I'm coming to an end of my graduate program and wouldn't you know I've been talking a lot about housing at my graduate art school. But I found some really kind of funny overlaps, and that's what I'm gonna be talking to you about today. And so basically if I were to succinctly say what my overlaps are, it's really about the language that we're using when we're talking about housing. So I'm talking to you today about how we are talking about home. And then for those of you in the room who are in the housing field, you might be familiar with the question of when your family or friends are asking what you do for work and they can't quite remember what it is. They're like, well, are you still working at the housing authority or are you still working at the shelter? You know, they kind of group all the housing things into one familiar word. And it's kind of exhausting to like try and describe what it is that you're even. Oh, I use pictures for this one. I gotta get to my slideshow. Yeah, so what is it that we're doing? Are we all standing outside with signs all the time? It's kind of exciting. That's, I wish that that was always what it looked like. But yeah, it's hard to talk about what we do. And then for those of you in the room who are artists, you might be equally dreading that question when someone asks, well, what do you do for work? And then you say, I'm an artist and you feel bad about it. And then you also know that whatever they're imagining an artist is, is definitely not what you're doing. This is me explaining what I do. Here I am also explaining what I do. So yeah, the way we talk about things are really hard. The names of things capture so little of what we're trying to communicate. And I kind of wonder if this is true for every profession. You know, I wonder if like the city planners are like so tired of explaining like what it's like to go to, I don't know, public hearings or the bureaucratic hoops that they're going through. I kind of don't even know like, you know, we all have assumptions about what this work looks like. Here I am in both my different roles. So I'm gonna talk to you a little bit. For me, I have to start at the beginning like to help show kind of what the overlap is for me. And of course, home is kind of the beginning for everyone. I have a picture up here of my first home. On the left is a picture of my woman's small business program that I participated through Mercy Connections for free with a visa grant. I wanna say like five years ago, but time is very stretchy right now, so that could be wrong. But I met Mary there, who's a good friend of mine to this day and ended up helping me buy my first house. So on the right is my family or my friends who are my family in a lot of ways celebrating my 30th birthday when we're moving into the house. Stable housing is really important. So I mean, no, I'm preaching to the choir here, but I feel like for me it's helpful to kind of contextualize it in the personal. So stable housing for me gave access to reliable, safe healthcare and helped me diagnose an autoimmune disease that I now have a really reliable doctor to help treat. It gave me critical mental health services that I was able to share with my family when they moved in with me and at the beginning of the pandemic. And it also empowered me to overcome complex trauma that made it really hard to drive. So I actually just got my driver's license. I am 32 and I got my driver's license last fall with the help of higher ability. And again, this is a resource that I was able to access because I have a stable community. People that could help me connect to the services I needed. I also wanna note too, I'll circle back to this. Stable housing helped me build my chosen family and my chosen family allows me to kind of take care of my own stuff and be more present for my family who have a lot of things going on. It's taught me to care about our role in civic engagement which might sound funny to a lot of people who know me as a housing advocate. I really didn't care for politics at all. Up until my mid-20s, I really felt like I disenfranchised by the system because I didn't know how I engaged with it. Let's see. Oh, it's like giving me a place to rest to really be myself. Feeling that sense of belonging, having a place that you have agency over. It's kind of indescribable unless you've been in the position where you're constantly exposing yourself to people where you don't have privacy or a place where right now I'm at a podium and I'm kind of performing for you all but we're all kind of performing when we're in public spaces. And I just wanted to note too that accessing these really important resources like higher ability meant identifying with terminology that I actually didn't relate to and this comes up a lot in my work. So when we receive public services you kind of have to check a box. Say you're a thing to get the thing, right? And so it was difficult for me to kind of overcome that challenge to say I have a disability and I need to access this service but it was really important for me to have agency in my life to be able to move through the world to have job abilities or more jobs options. And just on that note, a kind of anecdote my colleague and I were teaching a Vermont tenants workshop. It was a translated workshop so we're teaching, we had a translator interpreting everything we said into Lingala so surely because we know words are so weirdly interpretive and dynamic there's always information lost in that way. And one of our participants kind of like looked at us and said, hey, all right, listen I worked really hard to get my housing and a lot of the folks that we were working with were in precarious housing situations so they were making decisions to just get their basic need met that might mean overcrowding there's people overcrowding there is one woman who couldn't get any out of her apartment without help, which is extremely unsafe. And so this person says, hey, like I have to say I am homeless to get the services I need and I'm not gonna say that, you know I worked really hard to get this housing and what we know as housing advocates is that homelessness just as every other kind of like word I'm throwing out there doesn't look a certain way there's a lot of different ways that you know, we were kind of like giving this narrative that's like the most like visible way to talk about it but there's like folks that sleep in cars there's folks that couch surf and again, there's this kind of definition that doesn't fit everyone and in this moment, telling someone like you have to say that you're homeless in order to get the thing that you need was a real significant barrier for this community. All right, so the other thing I'll just say too is home is a deeply personal conversation. So for me, home is always like the first place is always this house in Vermont that I lived at and with my family. So we lived in Brownsville, Vermont it's a little village in West Windsor. They call it the Connecticut River Valley down there but I really remember it for the Mill Brook. That's where we released our salmon that we would have raised at Albert Bridge Elementary. And that was a really important place for me. I arrived when I was in second grade and at that time I had moved more years than I had lived. So it was like this place and it's the place that comes up in my dreams all the time and a really important spot. But it wasn't meant to last as families do. We went through some really challenging stuff. My mom ended up raising us on our own and basically in that part of Vermont, you're driving to get to school, you're driving to get to work. If you're a single parent and you're raising four kids, Mike, is this the picture? Yeah, look at these kids, terrible, right? So basically what that meant was that either the job wasn't attended to when it was supposed to be or the kids weren't. Someone got the short end of the stick. And it also meant that my mom's mental health got really challenging and we weren't meeting our basic needs anymore. And it led to a lot of like bad stuff. So we weren't making it to school. We weren't getting our food met or we weren't getting food at night and basically eventually we lost our house, which meant we lost our pets and our spaces and all the places we played. That's my mom. She kind of looks like me. Funny how that works. Yeah, it was a really vulnerable time. And basically what I learned from my time of housing insecurity, which was a long time, is that most places aren't hospitable to outsiders. So it's kind of when you're in a transient place, it's your most like public, it's the most visible things that people know about you because you don't have a private place to have that. So my community knew about the fights I got with my mom at the gas station. Very visible things or when we're pulled over close to school and people aren't all kind and generous and so there certainly were neighbors and teachers and friends and parents' friends that said things about it. Now the things that you do need slip through the cracks. So people are really remembering the things that you wish they wouldn't remember, but the things that you wish people would notice are not visible. One thing too that I just wanted to draw attention to is that for a single woman, for a single mom, there's extra attention on certain things. So extra attention on how she conducted herself, what she did for work was always a topic, a conversation, what she was wearing, who she was seeing, which wasn't always the same person. This is the things dropping through the cracks. I'm using some of my art, my messy art just to kind of illustrate some of these transient feelings. So the story you are told about yourself is why you start to live. And so as a young adult moving from one apartment to the next, I began to feel sorry for intruding on other people's neighborhoods. You know, like I felt bad when, especially when my neighbors were like home owners, like sorry I'm one of them, like just passing through. I was forced to sublet illegally in an overcrowded apartment for my first few years of, depending on adulthood, because I had bad credit and didn't have a family member to co-sign for me. And that apartment was infested with squirrels and now is burned down on King Street. So there you go. Yeah, and I felt like a criminal in the place I slept because I wasn't supposed to be there. By 16, I was crashing on friends' couches with parents that like, you know, wouldn't notice, which said another kind of thing about how my friends were living. By 17, or by 17 it started to be buildings on top of buildings, gazebos, churches. Yeah, and honestly housing and security exposed my three sisters and I to violence, lack of safety, and persecution. So when I started working at affordable housing, I used to say access to affordable housing would have changed my family's life. And it's a nice thing to say. And a lot of ways I believe it's true. And while I believe it could have, I will say it's not always true and know that it's a hard thing to bring up in a space where we obviously need more affordable housing. So basically what happens in affordable housing, especially in these more high-density situations, is that you have a little bit less privacy and your life is more surveilled. So as I was saying with these moments of the fights at the gas station, it's nice to have those fights where no one else hears them. We all have them. We have families of messy business and if you are dealing with crisis or poverty or mental health issues, really calming stuff for anyone, especially calming, and communities that are experiencing lots of trauma, you don't want other people to be privy to that and you certainly don't wanna feel like it's intruding on someone's space or that they might call the police on you. In some cases, living in affordable housing can be really great. So if you have a great relationship with your neighbors, they might walk your dog for you. Let's see, I'm gonna stay here for a second. I know a gentleman at Decker Towers that walks dogs for all of his neighbors. He's often bringing up folks to the hospital. That's a big building, so he's a busy person. I receive calls from people in affordable housing all the time concerned about elderly neighbors that when they notice that they're not able to care for themselves anymore. There's a woman at Lorentide who is always surrounded by a gaggle of kids that are not her own, but she's certainly entertaining them, just a great lady. And there's a man at Juniper House that if you just talk to him for three minutes, he will always be bringing you food. These are all affordable housing communities, by the way, and they're all different. So some are shambling housing trusts, some are cathedral square, which is senior living. And I know I spoke to an Arabic woman, or an Arabic-speaking woman at Franklin Square Housing, that's a Burlington Housing Authority property, and she came to, she was one of the only people that came to our workshop, but she came with a list of concerns for her and her neighbors that she was getting clear answers on, and she brought them back to her community. But affordable housing's tasked with holding a lot of complex and conflicting needs, and our solutions are often limited to disenforcing the rules. I was told by a resident recently, he doesn't let his daughter have friends over because he's afraid he'll get a lease violation, which is against the Fair Housing Act, and that's part of why we do so much education for Fair Housing Month. I was told by a high school older sister that her siblings and her are afraid that their landlords get a no cause of victim, and that they're gonna lose their housing voucher, and she's worried that she's not gonna make it through high school. I remember when I first started working in affordable housing, I was an AmeriCorps member, and I also worked at the grocery store because anyone who knows AmeriCorps knows that you can't live in Burlington with that stipend. And my coworkers pretty consistently would ask, they'd be like, oh, you work in affordable housing? I live at, you know, Champlain Housing Trust, BHA, blah, blah, blah, and they bring this, like, they're complex problems to me, like trying to tell me like, hey, can you explain to my property manager that the smoke coming into my apartment is making my kids sick? And they're thinking, it's a language barrier, but my coworker's gonna help me out. And I'm thinking, yeah, I'm gonna help you out. And then I'm trying to navigate the system, and that's when I realize like, oh, this is really hard, and I'm not gonna get an answer for this coworker. And this brings us to the conflict of today. So here we are this year, and I'm realizing in grad school, I'm in Baltimore doing the artist life, which feels like a pretty bougie way of living, giving the other work I do. And I'm showing my mentor paintings like these, and I'm saying it's all about home, right? And I think it is still. But he goes, hey, I actually don't see any home here. Like, where's the roof? Where's the window? Where's the door? You know, like, I see relationships, I see relationships between people and spaces and objects. And I was pretty bummed because I was like, wow, my whole thesis just got sunk, thank you. But then it was funny, because I come back to Vermont and I'm teaching these 10 skills workshops. At the Fair Housing Project, we do a live or outreach through partnerships with different organizations. And we had a partnership with the Vermont Garden Network, which was great because I always find that people like talking about their housing issues when they're not coming to a conflict-oriented space. So, you know, if I come and do a workshop and it's like, know your rights, everyone's like, I'm good, thank you, I'm not getting in trouble, you know. But if I'm coming and I'm just like at a garden where everyone's like learning about planting garlic, and then I introduce myself like, hi, I'm Karen, I work for the Fair Housing Project. They're like, you know what's fair? I'll tell you what's fair. And then I'm over here like, okay, now I have to explain what fair housing is, the difference between the capital F fair, like the Fair Housing Act and Housing Discrimination. And just what's like, you know, feels not right in the world, which, you know, if you don't have housing choice, a lot of things can feel unfair. And it comes back to language, right? So I'm still having this thing where like at grad school, they're like, this isn't housing in my workplace. They're like, I don't understand what you're talking about when you say fair housing. And so the thing is that we talk about housing and we all have this like weird icon that comes to mind, the like square with the triangle. You know, you can start to see it here. There's more happening with this image of a house than the icon when I give this young person credit. So, and we see this all the time at the Fair Housing Project. We put out our heart and home art kits as Jasper's talking about. They have free art supplies, but they also have these art prompts that ask people to kind of reflect on what home means to them. And we often get the square, the triangle. And I'll tell you, a lot of the people we work with don't live in what we call a single family home. That's what's being represented. That's the iconic single family home. We've worked with a lot of people that live in homes that might look like a box with a lot of windows or might be a mobile home or a modular home as we're calling them now. Most people living in mobile homes still call them mobile homes, but it all comes back to language, like who you are, who you're speaking to, right? And so then we had this kind of like amazing thing happen last year. We had a library, one of the things we do for Fair Housing Month is we partner with libraries and libraries get all our kits out in the community. And this library in Bent Northrop Library up in our Northeast Kingdom partnered with a local school. And I'm showing you like six, we got like 50 of these submissions, so many. And so the librarian basically worked with the art teacher and kind of like asked the kids to take this one step further with this conversation about home. And look at what we got here. I mean, we have Avery's over here with these purple curtains and this unicorn window or poster, I don't know. Joe is showing the cat on the refrigerator which anyone who's had a cat like just knows that feeling so much in this really distinctive floor pattern. Riley's either got a secret friend, you know, imaginary friend or a sibling and a bunk bed. Mila, my eyes are kind of bad, I can't, I think Mila is the name. This is a spaceship, so good for Mila. Lane is over here saying like my PS4 is the thing that makes home and I'm not just gonna dry it, I'm also gonna label it. So the PS4 and then the couch of course. You can't have a PS4 and no couch. And then look at this like purple flooring. So just to say that what are these kids doing? They're showing us, our students, they're showing us relationships to their space, relationships to the people sharing their space and relationships to the objects in that space. Oh, and I do like to end on Declan's piece because as we can see it's a tent with the moon and the dogs. And I think that it really just shows us that we have assumptions about what people need and want in home. But like if they really are asked to think about it it might not be what you think it is. And you know, like Declan might like have a space that's like protected from the elements. But I think it's just kind of interesting to think about how Declan's really connected to this kind of rural space. And this is just from our heart and home kit. So yeah, when I think about home as a person that's moved a lot in my life, I think about the people and the places. So in that way having connection to place is really important. And you know, like what's the problem I'm presenting? I'm not asking everyone to become artists because I think that art is more nuanced when we talk about home. I do think that. But I am saying that there are different ways that we can be talking about home, thinking about home and engaging the people that are being housed. And I actually think that that work is already being done. And this is the mosaic that I did with Mary Lacey down at the water, the bike path. And I will say that we engaged that gentleman from Juniper Collective that will give you food. He came right over to this mosaic with food for us. And so I had the privilege just past April of curating a set of Fair Housing Fridays. So these are virtual conversations that we're having with community leaders, housing providers, residents in affordable housing, people with stakes in housing, all kinds of people about different housing topics. And so we had three big topics that I curated. So I really like led us up to this moment here. And the first one was about resident agency and home space. And so our friends at Juniper Creative, Will and Jennifer came and talked about how having, inviting residents to really change the space that they're living in and have a stake in that space and how we're representing figures in that space is important for a sense of community. So I just used some representations. These are just like drawings from different community projects. I do, the other thing I'll just say too while I'm on this is that I think when we're talking about affordable housing it's also important not to tokenize the people that we're serving and that can be hard because we also wanna be inclusive, right? But there's always that risk if we're relying too heavily on the image of the people that need the service that we're giving. I also asked a resident that we worked with at Lorentide that's a Champlain Housing Trust building to speak to how doing resident-engaged projects changed our sense of community. And I will say that since my peer Lydia here and I led this art project, the resident leaders that kind of emerged from this project are still organizing in their community today, including doing weekly coffee sessions. I'm sorry, Megan, for that weird screenshot. But I did wanna talk about how Evernorth Megan from Evernorth was one of our speakers at this Fair Housing Friday and did a really excellent presentation about how they're engaging residents in the rehabilitation projects that they're leading. And so I'm gonna not do it justice. Fortunately, this is all recorded so everyone can watch this conversation. But this was, Megan was talking about how we have assumptions about how people might use a space. And when they did some engagement with the residents, it made their work more efficient because they're also learning like, hey, actually, the assumption was that people with two and three bedroom apartments like we have their own washer dryer unit in the building. And they learned through this survey that that was not the case at all. And there's some other like really interesting things that they learned through. I mean, Megan had like a 15 minute presentation. You should just check it out because it's up on our website. So we should listen to the people that we're housing. It seems like pretty basic, but I think the urgency of our work can sometimes make that step feel too hard. I don't know if it is too hard. Home is more than a place. We really need to be talking about as, well, I don't know if that it's, home is more than the brick and mortar. It's a place where people live. It's a space that people interact with. We also heard from our friends in the Connecticut River Valley. There was two young, really rad media makers, documentarians, and tenant organizers that came and spoke at our second Fair Housing Friday. And they talked at great length about how the power dynamic between the landlord and the tenants made it really hard for them to speak up for themselves and that people often didn't even know what their rights and responsibilities were. So of course, we need to give, make sure our access to education is really accessible. And we know that if housing is not an option for everyone, that our tenants become, they're in a precarious place where they're not, they don't have ownership over the place that they live. So we have to make sure that they have housing stability and just cause is one way to do that. And then here we go. The John Hafner for Vital Communities joined us for our second Fair Housing Friday. And he talked, he did a really excellent presentation. Again, about shifting this conversation, shifting the story about who we are. And he starts with this, it's a different picture than the first time I saw him give this presentation. He Googles for my house or something. And he just shows this picture, which is the icon that we all imagine home to be in Vermont. Like the rolling hills and the single family home and the barn, right? Most of us don't live in houses that look like this. It's not a sustainable practice. And he kind of did this really excellent presentation about the housing as a theory of everything. And one of the examples that he gave was we often don't talk about mobile homes or modular home communities as a affordable housing option, but that's a really important part of our housing options in Vermont. And for a lot of folks who need affordable housing, it's actually, you know, perhaps more meets their needs better. Cause modular home communities or mobile home communities can be in more, often are in more rural places. So you get that connection to nature. He talked about an example where one community had access to renewable energy resources, technology, and it brought their bills down and made living there even more affordable. And then of course, some of these communities already have kind of a social component built into it. So this is just a really great framework to use when thinking and talking about housing. And again, it's recorded and on our website. Well, shortly we'll be on our website. I'm a little bit behind. So yeah, obviously it comes back to thinking about the spaces that people are living in. I'm not gonna touch on this, but I'm just gonna say again, this CEDO gave a really great presentation about the different types of houses that exist in Burlington. And one of the things he mentioned is that in Vermont we often face this pushback where they say, hey, like affordable housing, it's not like more housing or higher denser housing isn't part of the character of the community. And over here we're seeing there's like 10 units, 80 units, 15 units, 53 units, which I'm like, how is that even possible? So you can see that all of these homes look the same. So that's debunked character of community. And then I just wanted to end on the why our story and housing that would have been talking about this whole time. So when we talk about home, we rarely have the opportunity to speak about it outside the brick and mortar of housing. And at a time when communities across the US are facing their greatest need for housing, it's critical to be thinking as much about community connection and environmental resilience as the physicality of the development. And I notice a pattern. I think we all notice a pattern in housing where we just use the same terminology over and over again. We often have the same speakers. We might use acronyms that are not accessible to people. And these phrases can already evoke binary and polarized assumptions. And we see that all the time when we talk about affordable housing. It's so easy for someone to desire housing for their family and friends when that need inevitably arises, because it always does. But as soon as this term affordable housing is thrown into play, oftentimes that's when these ideas of what that means comes up. So this is where I'm ending. Yeah, let's keep this conversation going. The work is already happening and let's make sure that we just prioritize in this work that we're doing. And that as community members who aren't housing advocates, we elbow some space for engagement. That's it. And I think that Sarah Russell is coming up. Sarah Russell has not prepared a thesis for graduate school. I'm just letting you all know. Yeah, well, if you, I should have mentioned. I didn't want to show you up. But I do want to just show before I give the mic to you. My housing shirt. Wait, step out so people can take this way. Oh, it's the podium. Yeah, it's the podium's in the way. I have it spatially. All right, should I close this? Sure. Yeah, I did not prepare a thesis around this. But I wanted to start off by saying thank you to CVOEO, Jess gave a lot of shout outs in the beginning. And I don't know if really did herself and her team justice with all of the hard work that they've done with putting together these events. I mean, this is like incredible work that they've done across the state for the entire month. I think you both need a huge vacation now because I don't know how you're doing all of this. So thank you so much for being so dedicated to this work and sharing so much of yourselves with all of us. So tonight I was asked to talk a little bit about homelessness and Karen did a really fabulous job of talking about housing and all of the ways that housing can look different and feel different to people. And I think that for some folks who are not in housing yet, they still have a sense of home, right? They still have a sense of community. And it's something that we try to build among people and it's something that we see people trying to build among themselves, whether that is within a shelter setting, whether that is outside, you know, un-sheltered or camping, whether that is within the YMCA, whether that is at the Elmwood Community Shelter that we recently opened a few months ago, we see people trying really hard to make connections with people. And I think that that's really at the core of what Karen's been talking about is like this connection that people desire, that everyone wants. And certainly that's more feasible within a home. Where you have a defined space that you can call your home or call your own, but we still see people across the community working to build community in different ways, working to build that connection. So a few of the things that I wanted to talk about tonight were in addition to working for the city of Burlington as the special assistant to end homelessness, I also serve as the co-chair for the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance, which if you're not familiar with the Homeless Alliance as a group of about 30ish stakeholders in the community representing other community agencies, representing the city, and representing members of our state, team, agency of human services, et cetera, who work together to in partnership to try to find a path forward to support people with moving into permanent affordable housing, our mission is to be clear, realistic, and it is not to end homelessness. It is acknowledging that we will have some churn within our system at all times, but it's ensuring that homelessness is rare when it happens, that it's brief, that we're able to move people right back into permanent housing and avoid a long stint without housing and that it's non-recurring, which is a key piece of this. And I do think speaks to a lot of what Karen talked about around the importance of prevention work. So if we're not targeting that prevention work or targeting our efforts toward that prevention work, at the same time as we're trying to help people to move into housing, then we're just gonna see this cycle, right? So we have to make sure that people have access to affordable housing in a way that is fair and equitable, but also that they keep and they maintain that housing. So those are sort of the key, three key principles that we work under with the Homeless Alliance. One of the ways that we try to create equity in the system, I heard a lot about fair housing in what Karen was saying, and I think really at the core of that is equity, right? So making sure that people have equity and access to housing resources. And in our community and other communities across the country, we have something called coordinated entry, which means that it's a no wrong-door approach that no matter what social service organization that folks enter through for assistance, they will receive access to the same housing resources as anyone else. We also measure use collective data as a community so that we can measure our impact and understand trends and really see kind of like how we're doing and like where something works really well, like what did we do that worked so well and how do we do more of that? How do we do that again? So some data points I wanted to share this evening are that in Chittenden County right now there's currently 626 households who are homeless within our system. Those are households, mind you. So a household could be one person or it could be five or six or seven people. We have 64 families out of that 626. We have 231 chronic households, which is a number that is higher than what we've ever seen. Pre-pandemic, that number was around 35. And the definition of chronic means that it's long-term homelessness. So that people have been in a state of homelessness for 12 consecutive months at minimum. And so we're seeing a lot of people in homelessness for a much longer period of time, which really gets at that brief piece. We gotta figure that, we have to figure that piece out. We also have 25 veterans who are currently homeless and we have 43 youth, which is really sad and super tough. So those youth are ages 18 to 24. And many of them, we know that when children experience homelessness in their families, that they are far more likely to experience homelessness as adults. So it's super critical that we tackle that youth number two. So we break out by each subpopulation to understand how we're doing with certain subpopulations to make sure that we're assisting the most vulnerable people in our community. That's kind of the equity piece. And I guess I wanna say one last data point, I will say, so that feels crummy. That doesn't feel good to hear that. We have currently 90 households within our coordinated entry system that are ready to move into housing. They have done everything that they need to do to be successful in housing and they're just waiting for an affordable unit. So to think about that, that's a big chunk of that, that 626 households and it really speaks to the need for affordable housing and to make sure that we're being able to, or that we're able to transition people from homelessness into affordable housing in a way that is equitable. I will say that the last data points are a little bit more upbeat. We're doing a great job at housing people as quickly as possible as units become available. We're forming partnerships with private housing developers for the very first time, thanks to some incentives around, for them to access funding. In December we housed 52 households, in January we housed 26, February we housed 27 and March we housed 28. So we're really making a dent, we're trying to really make a dent in doing that. The last piece that I wanted to speak to you, I've talked to data a lot and I think something that really shined through in what Corinne was sharing with you all and something that I really wanted to share that I feel super passionately about is that connection piece. I heard you say, and I had actually written it down on my PowerPoint here, is listening to people. And I think that that's something that gets really underrated, right? We think about when you come home from work and somebody asks you about your day, you're not thinking like, gosh, somebody cared what I did all day long. You're like, oh, I got into traffic and I couldn't get this at the grocery store and got to pick up the kids from whatever. But for folks who don't necessarily have that connection, that listening piece is so critical. And it's something that I try to focus on in every single interaction that I have with people. And it can be overwhelming, but I think that we really don't give credit to that connection piece and to that listening piece. And I think that I would add to that is like listening and showing up. And when you say you're gonna show up, like be there and show up. And I think that it helps to build trust within a population that sometimes has had trust broken many, many, many times over and over and over again. And so to me, I think the most important thing that we can do is fill that connection gap, listen and show up. So that's where I would leave that. I think that every single person that I've talked to and I have been doing this work now for 20 years actually, I started off doing direct service, providing case management to households who were homeless for a nonprofit here in Burlington. And then I moved into working for the Burlington Housing Authority and managing and developing housing retention programs to prevent people from becoming homeless. And now I've moved to this position at the city where I'm able to kind of merge both of those things around both the homelessness piece and also working on that prevention piece. So it's been a really great trip for me personally, but I think that the most important thing that I've learned and the thing that I carry with me are these stories that I have talked to, talked to hundreds of people over the last 20 years and I carry those with me, and that inspires me, it makes me cry because it's sad, it makes me smile because it feels good just this evening. I was walking in my car right before this meeting and a gentleman and his partner were coming through the park and he said, hey, Sarah, I just wanted to tell you and he was a person that we had had at the extreme cold weather shelter that I staffed a few months ago and he had a tough time at that shelter, but he came over to me and he's like, I just want to tell you, we just got into Elmwood. We have our own place there, like they're in a shelter unit and he was just so excited and the greatest thing that I heard them say was like, we don't have to carry our stuff around everywhere. We have a door that we can lock, and I thought, how profound? I don't think about not being able to run errands or drop my kids off somewhere or go to a doctor's appointment or go to work and think, oh, I got to bring literally everything I own on my back, and so they were just so excited and I was like, God, it made me just glow with just joy for them, so it's nice when you get to see things come full circle, so I wanted to share that. Just happened tonight. I think that's all I have to share. I don't know if I've gone over time or bored you all or where we are in our program, but I guess we'll turn it back over to Jess, so thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah and Corinne, and now that you've sat down, I'm gonna ask you to come right back up because we want to open up to questions. We want to hear what you're all thinking. What inspired you from hearing these two talks? What are you thinking about? Has it changed your perception of home? What questions do you have for our amazing folks here? And we'll turn it over to both of you. From the audience. Should I go to the microphone? Yeah, okay, the answer is yes. Yeah, I think that that's a good question, so for anyone that didn't hear, Lydia, who is clearly an artist, wearing arched pants with paint on them, has asked about vocabulary and words in housing and asked about abstraction, so I kind of went through those images really fast, but you might have seen some figures, you might have seen no figures, and that is because I do kind of play around with this idea of abstraction, and I think the thing that abstraction does in visual art is it makes something more nuanced, so it doesn't mean it's one thing, right? So there's, you know, everyone's probably done that thing where you're lying on the bed and you're looking at the shadows or the drip marks on the ceiling, and you kind of see a face, and for you, it's always a face, but for your sister, it might be a weird cloud shape, or something kind of scary, so that's kind of what abstraction does, you can see what you're looking for and it can mean something very different for each person, and I think that it's, I'm like, how do we do that in housing language? I'm not quite sure, but I think that some of the things I pointed to starts to do that. Any other questions? Another question. Yeah. Yeah, do you want to take a stab at that, sir? No. No. 28 years of experience. No, no, I don't. I mean, I think that what we saw, what we saw with the pandemic is that we, there used to be very, or there are, very strict definitions of homelessness, so for example, within that definition, couch surfing does not count, so if you have nowhere to go and are sleeping on the floor of someone else's home, then you don't, you're not homeless. If you're in a motel paying for yourself to stay in a motel, like you're working so hard and you're paying so much for your motel that you can never get out of there, it's called self-pay, that doesn't qualify as homeless. And so we miss a lot of people, when we talk about people who are at risk of homelessness, there are very clear definitions around people who are at risk, so that means that you have to be, you have to receive an eviction notice in order to be at risk of eviction. And for some of these challenges, like people need support long before they get that eviction notice, like to repair harm, in some cases, within 30 days or 14 days is like literally impossible. So I think that the definitions that we use pre-pandemic for homelessness were really tight. And what the pandemic did was allowed us to say, we're not gonna use those definitions, we're gonna help everybody who needs help and we're gonna give them a safe place to stay during this public health emergency. And so we moved a bunch of people who were in those, like on the fringe, really vulnerable situations into motel rooms. What we didn't see during the pandemic was a lot of people lose their housing because of the eviction moratoriums. However, the minute that those were lifted after the pandemic, we saw people falling into eviction. So I think we had a couple of things happening where we all of a sudden were getting a full scope view of the number of people who are homeless, really, and who really were living on the fringe or were housing insecure. And then we put them in motels and now we have no affordable housing to move those folks into. So it's become a huge challenge for sure. I mean, I think that we, with the motel program, I think that's everybody's hearing about that, sort of in the news, the current budget that's been passed by the Senate is now in the house, will send 90% of the three, there in Chintana County, there's 340 families or households that are in motels. We'll send 90% of those families out of motels, no longer be eligible after July 1st. We don't have housing to support those, I think we all agree that motels are not an ideal place to house households. I go on a weekend with my three kids in a hotel room and I'm ready to pull my hair out after the first 24 hours. It's not a healthy place to call home for people. But we don't have other solutions until we have more affordable housing. So I don't know if that fully answers your question, but I hope I've provided some level of insight. Sure. Jess, were you like, I thought you were like itching and, yeah, what do you want to say? I'm just thinking, current numbers be well. The other part of your question that I would like to answer too is you were talking about how the economy's so good. Well, it is really good for a certain percentage of the population. And the problem is that the systems that we've created to support the most vulnerable in our communities, to keep our economies going, they're all designed to benefit a very small amount of people who are already doing okay. And those people are still doing okay and they will always be doing okay. And what we saw during the pandemic is that the systems that weren't working still aren't working and the challenges have really been exacerbated for the folks who are already feeling the pinch. And so that's another reason as well. Yeah, I mean, we could answer that question for the rest of the evening because that's what we do for work, but it's a complex problem and it's a really good question. And if I could add just one more thing, if you want to kind of think about this a little more, one of the books, there are a bunch of books down the back that everyone's welcome to bring home is a new book by Michael Desmond and he wrote Evicted and his new book is called Poverty, By America. And he talks about some of how we got where we are today but also what could possibly be changed to make it better. So I'd encourage you to bring it home and give it a read. I haven't read it yet, it just came out but I'm really looking forward to it myself. Well, I think we know it just gets worse unless we do something about it, which obviously the work that the housing advocates are doing is asking for more affordable housing. The problem is that we ask for that all the time and we're not getting it very fast. It is slow moving. So there's a whole other conversation about how to circumvent the bureaucracy of getting a housing and part of, there's like a whole, because there's also the NIMBY attitude. Again, like people want affordable housing until it's in their neighborhood and it's like across the board happens over and over and over again. It's usually the most liberal leading spaces that are actually the most against housing being developed in their communities and there's always this idea of like, oh, that would be great over there, you know? Like, oh, the bus lines over there, you know? Like, oh, but we're protecting nature over here. It's like, we can do all the things, but like housing is a really important thing that also for resilient communities in terms of environments too. But again, could talk about that all night long. But I saw a question. Who's like itching to start that? Should I start? You guys can think? How do you? Okay, so the question was, I'm paraphrasing, with all of the folks in the room that are like thinking and talking about housing all the time. If there was like a magic solution, like something that would just be, you know, foundational and changing this really long housing crisis, and I know you know this, Ted, we've been talking about the housing shortage in Burlington for at least a decade, many decades, a long time. And so it was like, what, like, is there a thing that could really like move the lever that we're just like, you know, if we had a magic wand instead of saying like, oh, we can't even talk about that, because it'd be too hard. And one of the things Bren brought up was affordable home ownership. A lot of the times they're not building equity as someone would buying a house outright with inherited money or the money they got from their family selling their house. Everywhere. Yeah, I think from the, oh, wait, to be, Megan, oh, Brian, sorry, Megan. Oh, thanks, Megan. Brian, did you have something you wanted to add or are you? Yeah. The only other thing that I would add is I think that in an ideal world, we would be challenging our own biases. So when we talk about building housing for folks, I think that people are often like, well, as long as they're getting sober or as long as they have a job or as long as they are, whatever that list goes on and on and on. And I think that what, I've heard a few times tonight around housing as a human right is like, I think that what we actually have to do is like, embrace that thought, right? That housing is a human right. And it's not but for different populations or people who have challenges. We have to actually own that as a value, as a society. And I mean, if there is something we could, a magic wand that I could do, it would be to really consider what it would look like for housing to be, for everyone, regardless of how they grew up, what they look like, how they interact with others, with their using substances, what color their skin is, how many people they have in their family, whatever that might look like. I think that we need to really just put that on, like a blanket in society. Yeah, and I think it's probably just around, okay, I've got like two minutes. So I'll just say too, in the spirit of Fair Housing Month, for me, one of the big issues is that people actually don't live outside of their socioeconomic bubble. Like a lot of their friends are in the same bubble, have a lot of the same upbringings, a lot of the same backgrounds and beliefs. And if you don't experience something that's outside of what you grew up with, like it's so much easier to utter it. And like there's certain things that you just don't know, you don't know. And one of the things I think about is, you know, the ways we communicate, like where I grew up and how I grew up, like yelling was a thing. It's not fun. Like I don't love yelling, but like it just was so much more a part of like our vocabulary, how we like work together, how we live together. And you know, like to this day, I often have phone calls with folks I'm working with and they might start that phone call yelling and they might yell for like five minutes. And then afterwards, if I just like hold on and listen, they might be like, wow, so sorry that happened. I'm just so worked up about my home where I live and don't have decision-making power. It's like, yeah, of course, that's how trauma works. Like you have an emotional reaction, but I have heard from folks that have been really vocally like, how's anything human right? Like justice for all. And then they're like, but my neighbors are trash, you know, they're like, I hear them yelling all the time. And it's like, but are they yelling or are they like having a real good party over that? You know, like what is their dog just really bothering them and that's how they communicate. We just, there's so much we don't know and because we live in these communities like South Wellington just passed policy last year that kind of further, like divided the city based on socioeconomic background. And, you know, there's this conversation about like, oh, well, if affordable housing can exist, it might as well exist near the bus line. It's like, not, you can't assume what people need. Like if people have a car and want to drive to their affordably priced home and want to live close to the woods too, like that really should be an option. Yeah, so I think that until we have more integrated communities and that's where it comes back to spaces, spaces where people interact and we don't all have the same background. We don't have the same assumptions. Like then we can start to actually get, you know, muscle behind these ideas because I can tell you, I'm obviously like on a younger end of the affordable housing advocates, like rapidly not being that anymore as I age out of that. But from the time I've done this work, it's been a lot of the same people. Every time I meet a young affordable housing advocate, I'm like, how did I not know you're out there? Cause it's really, it's been the same people for a long time and that's kind of on us because of the vocabulary thing. So, you know, there's no magic wand. I think it's the thing that really comes down to but hopefully more of this. I don't know if I could say that. Is that it? Do we do a formal closeout? So, I am gonna trip and fall on that before the night is over. Thank you, Corinne. Thank you, Sarah. Thank all of you for coming here tonight and being part of this conversation because as we learned, the conversation is what's important. Talking about these issues and talking about these issues with someone who you don't talk to every day is even more important. So, as you go out there in the world, think about what we've talked about today. Talk with a neighbor, talk with a friend, talk to a random person on the street and get to know who's in our community and that makes such a difference. There are lots of other ways to get involved with this work both throughout the Fair Housing Month is officially over at the end of April but the work continues year round. Every day is Fair Housing Day. There's an event this Saturday which is at Main Street Landing. It's a free movie night with the pursuit of happiness. I'm starring Will Smith and I think it's his son's movie debut. It was a movie from the early 90s maybe. Talks about a salesman who ends up experiencing homelessness with his son after an eviction and there'll be a happy hour with more discussion with food and more free books from CEDO and then the free movie and it's at six o'clock this Saturday the 29th at Main Street Landing. You're all invited, bring a friend and then if you go to our website, the Fair Housing Month website which is fairhousingvt.org. Thank you, Corinne, fairhousingmonthvt.org. You'll see the calendar events which includes more activities over the next few weeks and recordings of the Fair Housing Fridays that Corinne talked about. So thank you for coming out today. Keep this conversation going. Put pressure on your local, state, federal governments to make the changes that we wanna see and last but not least, before you leave this room and you're welcome to stay for as long as you want and continue talking, have more food, check out the books in back, take some home. There are art kits, take as many as you'd like for your family and friends and then we also have Fair Housing Materials and resources from CVOEO on the table and also some posters for the movie night which is coming up so take one with you, put it up at your work in your corner store to help us spread the word. Thank you all for everyone who helped make this happen and good night.