 Welcome everybody. How's everyone doing tonight? Good? Good? Good 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 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 Jantz 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 by 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 and 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 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 what we 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 want we also want to talk about all these issues in a positive way because we can't make change systemic change in our world in our in our world in our state in our community here in Burlington we can't make change without talking about it without getting people at all all over the political spectrum all over the age range and background etc 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 this these events possible because the Fair Housing Month events cover the whole state there's been there have been weeks of art activities films art exhibits community discussions and 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 the kudos that that they deserve so the keep 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 White River 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 the 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 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 later this this spring or summer also on that table we have art kits for the Heart and Home Art Project which Karen's going to be talking a lot more about in just a few moments please take them home share them with your with your 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 made this possible Farrell Farrell Properties the Burlington's Office of Racial Equity Inclusion and Belonging 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 going to hear from from from Corinne Yantz who is my colleague friend an amazing community artist a housing advocate and she's going to talk about home and community and art and then we will hear from Sarah Russell from CEDO who will talk about issues and and related to to homelessness and we're going to talk about what this all means and how we can 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 stable and accessible and affordable place to call home so thank you and I'll turn it over to Corinne. Hello and just so you know I really appreciate people eating food while they're here it makes me feel less nervous about being at a podium so please take care of your needs while you're here and we're going to be doing a lot of talking today as in I'm going to be doing a lot of talking and then we're all going to 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 going to 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 you know when your family or friends are asking what you do for work and 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 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 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 yep here I am in both my different roles so I'm gonna talk to you a little bit I for me I have to start at the beginning like to 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 want to 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 end 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 for when we're moving into the house stable housing is really important so I mean I know 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 health care 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 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 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 want to note to I wonder 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 it you know 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 a sense of belonging having a place that you have agency over like it just it's kind of indescribable unless you've like been in the position where you're constantly exposing yourself to people where you don't have privacy or a place where you know like 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 to you 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 you know 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 access a 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 you know at 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 situation 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 again there's this kind of definition that doesn't fit everyone and in this moment the 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 Millbrook that's where we released our salmon that we would have raised at Albert Ridge 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 time more years than I had lived so it was like this place and it you know it's the place that like 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 like really challenging stuff my mom ended up raising us on her own and basically you know like in that part of Vermont like 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 I'm like is this a 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 you know we like weren't making it to school we weren't like getting our food met or working food at night and basically eventually we lost our house which meant we lost their 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 their most visible things that people know about you because you don't have a private place to have that so you know my community knew about the fights I got with my mom at the gas station you know very visible things or when we're pulled over close to school and people you know aren't all kind and generous and so they're certainly neighbors and teachers and friends and parents friends that said things about it all 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 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 you know wasn't always the same person yeah this is the things dropping through the cracks I'm using some of my art my like 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 homeowners like sorry I'm one of them like just passing through I was forced to sublet illegally in an overcrowded apartment for my first like few years of independent adulthood because I had bad credit and didn't have a family member to you know cosign for me and that apartment was infested with squirrels and now is burned down on King Street so there you go um 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 in 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 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 situation is that you have um you know a little bit less privacy and and your life is more surveilled so as I was saying with these moments of like 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 messy 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 want to feel like it's intruding on someone's space or that they might call the police on you. In some cases living 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 great 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 they 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 Jindapur house that if you just like talk to him for like you know three minutes he will always be bringing you food these are all affordable housing communities by the way and they're all different so you know some are sampling 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 her 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 is 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 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 in her are afraid that their landlords get a no cause of victim and that they're going to lose their housing voucher and she's worried that she's not going to 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 co-workers 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 the smoke coming into my apartment is making my kids sick and they're thinking it's a language barrier but my co-workers 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 realized like oh this is really hard and I'm not gonna get an answer for this co-worker 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 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 you know come back to Vermont and teaching these tennis skills workshops at the Fair Housing Project we do a lot of our 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 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 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 to like square with the triangle you know you can start to see it here there's a 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 work with a lot of people that live in homes that you know might look like a box with a lot of windows or might be a mobile home you know like or a modular home as we're calling them now you know most people living in mobile homes still call them mobile homes but it all comes back to language like who you are who's 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 librarian bent Northrop library up in our in our northeast kingdom partnered with a local school and I'm showing you what like six we got like 50 of these submissions so many and so the librarian basically um worked with the art teacher and kind of like asked the kids to take this one step further 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 um this unicorn window or poster I don't know uh Joe is showing the cat on the refrigerator which anyone who's had a cat like just knows that feeling so much and this really distinctive floor pattern uh Riley's either got a secret friend you know imaginary friend or a sibling and a bunk bed Myla I my eyes are kind of bad so I can't I think Myla is the name this is a spaceship so good for Myla um Lane is over here saying like my ps4 is the thing that makes home and not just going to dry I'm also going to 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 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 um Declan's piece because as we can see it's a tent with the moon and the dogs and um 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 I in that way having connection to place is really important um and you know like what's the problem I'm presenting I'm not asking everyone to become artist 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 it's already being done um and this is a mosaic that um I did with Mary Lacey down at the water the the bike path and I will say that we engaged um that gentleman from Juniper Collective that that will give you food he came right over to this mosaic with food for us um 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 um and so we had three big uh 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 um and so our our friends at Juniper Creative Will and Jennifer came and talked about how um having um inviting residents to um 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 use 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 um I think when we're talking about affordable housing it's also important not to like tokenize the people that we're serving that can be hard because we also want to be inclusive right um but there's always that 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 um I will say that since uh my peer Lydia here and I led this art project um the resident leaders that kind of emerged from this project are still organizing in their community today uh including doing weekly uh coffee sessions um I'm sorry Megan for that like weird screenshot but I did want to talk about how Evernorth um Megan from Evernorth was one of our um speakers at this Fair Housing Friday and did a really excellent presentation about how they're engaging um 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 can watch this conversation but this was um Megan was talking about how we have assumptions about how people might use a space and when they did some um engagement with the residents it made their work more efficient because they're also learning like hey actually you know um 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 were 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 um home is more in a place we really need to be talking about as uh 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 um we also heard from our friends in the Connecticut River Valley there's uh was two um young really um rad um media makers documentarians and tenant um 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 um you know 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 um and then here we go the um John Hafner for vital communities joined us for a second Fair Housing Friday and he talked um he did a really excellent presentation again about um shifting this conversation shifting the story about who we are and he starts with this um it's a different picture than the first time I saw him give this presentation he googles Vermont like house or something and he just shows this like picture which is the icon that we all imagine home to be in Vermont like the the rolling hills and the single family home and the barn right uh most of us don't live in houses that look like this it's not a um 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 um we often don't talk about mobile homes and 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 um you know perhaps more meets their needs better because um mobile modular home communities or mobile home communities can be um in more often are in more rural places so you get that connection to nature um he talked about an example where one community had access to renewable um energy resources technology and it brought their bills down and made living there even more affordable and then of course um some of these communities already have kind of a social component built into it so um 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 um shortly will 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 um I'm not going to touch on this but I'm just going to say again this um CEDO gave a really great presentation about the the different types of houses that exist in Burlington and um one of the things they mentioned is that um we in Vermont we often face this pushback where they say hey like affordable housing it's not like more housing or higher density housing denser housing isn't part of the character of the community and over here we're seeing um 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 these um homes look the same so uh that's debunked character of community um and I just want to end on um the why our story and housing um you know 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 not um I notice a pattern I think we all notice a pattern pattern in housing where we just use the same terminology over and over again we often have the same speakers uh we might use acronyms that are not accessible to people um 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 it's um as soon as this term affordable housing is thrown into play oftentimes um that's when those these ideas of what that means comes up so this is where I'm ending yeah let's keep this conversation going there's 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 um engagement that's it and I think that Sarah Russell is coming up um Sarah Russell has not prepared a thesis for graduate school I just I'm just letting you all know yeah well if you if I should have mentioned the art for you 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 away oh it's the podium yes the podiums I especially all right should I close this sure thank you yeah I did not prepare a thesis um around this but I wanted to start off by saying thank you to um CVO just um 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 um for the entire month I think you both need a huge vacation now because I don't know how you're how you're doing all of this so um thank you so much for being so dedicated to this work and um sharing so much of yourselves um with all of us uh so tonight I was asked to talk a little bit about um homelessness and Corinne did a really fabulous job of talking about um housing and all of the ways that housing can look different and feel different to people um and um 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 unsheltered or camping um whether that is within the ymca um that whether that is at the um the Elmwood community shelter that we recently um 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 Corinne's been talking about is like this connection that um that people desire that everyone wants and certainly that's more feasible within a home um you know where you have a defined space that you can call your home or call your own um but we still see people across the community working to build community in different ways working to build that connection um so a few of the things that I wanted to talk about tonight were um in addition to working for the city of Burlington as the special assistant to end homelessness I also um serve as the co-chair for the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance which if you're not familiar with the Homeless Alliance is a group of about 30 um 30ish stakeholders in the community representing other community agencies representing the city um and representing members of you know our state team um agency of human services etc who work together to um in partnership um to try to find a path forward to support people with moving into permanent affordable housing um our our mission is to be clear realistic and it is not to end homelessness it is acknowledging that we will have some turn 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 um 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 and or targeting our efforts toward that prevention work at the same time as we're trying to trying to help people to um to move into housing then we're just gonna we're just gonna see this cycle right so we have to make sure that um people have access to affordable housing in a way that is fair and equitable um but also that they keep and they maintain that housing so those are sort of the key um three key principles that we work um that we work under um with the homeless alliance um one of the ways that we try to create equity in the system I heard a lot about fair housing in uh 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 um coordinated entry which means that that's a no wrong-doer 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 um we also measure um use collective data as a community so that we can measure our impact um 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 chinden county right now there's currently um 626 households um who are homeless within our system um those are households mind you so household could be one person or it could be five or six or seven people we have 64 families um out of that um 626 we have 231 chronic households which is um which is a number that is higher than what we've ever seen pre-pandemic that number was around 35 and the the definition of chronic means that it's long-term homelessness so so that people have been in a state of homelessness um can set 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 got to figure that we have to figure that piece out we also have 25 veterans um who are currently homeless and we have 43 youth which is really sad and super tough so those youth are ages 18 to 24 um and you know many of them we know that when children experience homelessness and 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 kind of how we're doing you know with with certain subpopulations to make sure that we're assisting the most vulnerable people in our community that's kind of the equity piece um and I guess I want to say one last data point I will say so those that that feels crummy that doesn't feel good to hear that we have currently 90 households um 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's a that's a big chunk of that you know that's 626 households um and it really speaks to the need for affordable housing and you know for 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 um I will say that the last data points are a little bit more upbeat we're doing a great job housing people um you know as quickly as possible as units become available we're you know forming partnerships with private housing developers for the very first time thanks to some um to to um some incentives around for them to access funding um 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 um and doing that um the last piece that I wanted to speak to you I've talked to um data a lot and I think something that really shined through and what Curran um was sharing with you all and something that I really want to share that I feel super passionately about is that connection piece um I heard you say and I had actually written it down on my on my power point here um is listening to people and I think that that's something that we gets really like underrated right like we don't we think about like when you come home from work and somebody asked you about your day you're not thinking like gosh somebody cared what I did all day long you know you're like oh I you know gun into traffic and I couldn't get this to the grocery store and you know gotta pick up the kids from whatever you know but first for for folks who don't necessarily have that connection like that listening piece is so critical and it's something that I try to focus on in like every single interaction that I have with people and um 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 going to 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 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 that's where I would where I would leave that I think that we 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 non-profit 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 it's been a really great trip for me personally but I think the most important thing that I've learned and the thing that I carry with me are these stories that I have talked to you know talked to hundreds of people over the last 20 years and I carry those with me you know and that inspires me it makes me cry because it's sad it makes me smile because you know it feels good just this evening I was walking in my car right before this 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 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 you know he was just so excited and the the greatest thing that I heard them say was like we don't have to carry our stuff around everywhere like we have a door that we can lock you know and I thought like how profound I don't think about not being able to like run errands or drop my kids off somewhere go to a doctor's appointment or go to work and think like oh I gotta bring literally everything I own on my back you know and so they were just so excited and I was like god like it made me just glow with just joy for them so it's nice when thing 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 just 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 I'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 going to 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 what inspired you from hearing those 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 I will turn it over to both of you oh we have a question from the audience oh that's an artist question should I go to the the microphone yeah okay the answer is yes um yeah I think that that's a good question so for anyone that didn't hear um Lydia who is clearly an artist wearing arch 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 um you know like everyone's probably done that thing where you're like lying on the bed and you're looking at like the shadows or the drip marks on the ceiling and you kind of see a face and like for you it's always a face but for your sister it might be like I don't know 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 um and I think that that it's I'm like how do we do that in housing language I'm not quite sure but I I think that some of the the things I pointed to starts to do that any other questions have another question yeah yeah do you want to take a stab at that sir 28 years of experience no no I don't um I mean I think that what we saw what what we saw with the pandemic is that we um there were there used to be very there 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 you don't you 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 are paying 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 you know 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 we're we're we're really tight and what the pandemic did was allowed us to say we don't we're not going to use those definitions we're going to help everybody who needs help and we're going to 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 becoming you know falling into eviction so i think we had a couple of things happening where we all of a sudden we're getting a full scope view of the number of people who are homeless really and who really you know we're living on the fringe or we're housing insecure and then we put them in motels and now we have no affordable housing to move those to move those folks into so it's it's become a huge challenge for sure i mean i think that we um with the motel program i think that's everybody's hearing about that sort of in the news um you know the current budget that's been passed by the senate is now in the house will send 90 percent of the three there in chintna county there's 340 families or households that are in motels will send 90 percent of those families out of motels no longer be eligible after after july 1st we don't have housing to support those to support those families i think we all agree that motels are not an ideal place to house households i go on a you know weekend with my three kids in a hotel room and i'm ready to pull my hair out after after the first 24 hours it's not a healthy place to call home for people um but 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 um i i hope i've i've provided some level of insight just for you like i i thought you were like like itching and yeah what do you want us to just think incoherently well um the other part of your question that i would like to answer too is you know you're uh talking about how you 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 um 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 you know 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 there it's the complex problem and it's a really good question and if i could add just one more thing if you want to 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 he wrote evicted and his new book is called poverty comma 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 yeah well i think we know it just gets worse unless we do something about it which um you know obviously the work that the housing advocates are doing is asking for more affordable housing the problem is that uh we ask for that all the time and we're not getting it very fast it is slow moving so like there's a whole another conversation about how to circumvent like the the bureaucracy of getting a housing and part of there's like a whole there's also the like the nimby attitude so you know 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 um 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 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 it could talk about that all night long but i saw a question so we stay in the lane of well do this thing and get people into rental housing that's considered affordable and then those people still don't have equity in the building so it's it's like well maybe now they have uh plates but they're not building equity the way a large part of the population does build equity and continues to build equity so i'm just curious though about what the possible who's like itching to start that should i start you guys can think audience okay so the question was um 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 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 and instead of saying like oh we can't even talk about that because it'd be too hard and and one of the things Brent brought up was affordable and affordable home ownership a lot of the times are not building equity as someone would of buying a house outright with you know inherited money or the money they got from their family selling their house so yeah i think from the oh wait to be here Megan oh Brian sorry Megan oh thanks Megan Brian did you have something you wanted to add or are you so that rich people could basically keep more of their money and not share with the rest of us and so the idea of housing is human right because it's constant in national policy from the 1930s the goal was to have everyone have a safe place to live was essentially abandoned 45 40 something years ago with that whole era and we have never gone we've never really got it so it's a national issue really it has to be done in a national level we can do a lot of a little level trans only all that stuff but we're largely nibbling around the edges because the issue is poor distribution of wealth and you know lots of underpacks wealth and really not enough resources going towards 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 you know as long as they're you know getting sober or as long as they have a job or you know as long as they you know are you know whatever that list goes on and on and on and i think that what you know i've heard a few times today 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 you know different different populations are people who have challenges we have to actually like own that as a value as a society and i mean if there is a something we could a magic you know want that i could do it would be to you know really consider what it would what it would look like for housing to be for everyone you know regardless of you know how they grew up what they look like how they you know interact with others with their using substances you know what color their skin is how many people they have in their family you know whatever that might look like i think that like we need to we need to really just like 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 i 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 this 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 other 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 um you know how 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 them 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 um i i have heard from folks that have been really vocally like housing is a human right like justice for all and then they're like but my neighbors are trash you know they they're like i hear them yelling all the time and it's like but are they like are they yelling 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 and because we live in these communities like like South Burlington just passed um you know policy last year that kind of further associate like divided the city based on socio-economic background and you know there's this conversation about like oh well if affordable housing is going to 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 like have a car and want to drive to our affordably priced home and want to live close to the woods too like that really should be an option um 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 um you know muscle behind these ideas because uh i can tell you i i'm obviously like on a younger end of the affordable housing advocates like rapidly not be being that anymore as i age out of that but um from the time i've done this work it's been a lot of the same people like i've every time i meet a young affordable housing advocate i'm like how did i not know you're out there because it's 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 it's there's no magic wand i think is 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 yes so the i am gonna trip and fall on that before before the night is over um thank you karin thank you sarah thank all of you for coming here tonight and being part of this conversation because as 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 you get to know who's in our community and through that that makes it makes such a difference um 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 and every day is fair housing day um there's an event this saturday which will which is at main street landing it's a free movie night with the pursuit of happiness um starring will smith and i think it's his son's movie debut it was a movie from the early nineties 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 cito and then the free movie it's at six o'clock this saturday the 29th the 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 fair housing vt.org thank you current fair housing month vt.org you'll see the calendar events which includes more activities over the next few weeks and recordings of the fair housing fridays that current talked about so thank you for coming out today keep this conversation going put pressure on your local state federal governments to make changes to make the changes that we want to 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 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 help us spread the word thank you all for everyone who helped make this happen and good night