Purpose

To support innovative, multi-sector solutions to housing instability, generated by community residents, that improve housing affordability and quality through policy and practice changes.

Funding Availability

• Planning grants (up to one year $100,000)
• General operating support and programmatic grants (up to two years, $200,000 per year).

It is anticipated that there will be additional funding opportunities in this category in late 2018 and 2019.

Background  

Decades of discriminatory housing, transportation and land-use policy and economic disinvestment have resulted in residential segregation by income, race and ethnicity – negatively impacting the health and well-being of residents and the entire populace of America’s cities. Residential segregation is often intertwined with the quality of neighborhood amenities in less-advantaged neighborhoods.

Over the past 10 years, The Kresge Foundation has operationalized its goal of expanding urban opportunity for people with low-income through grantmaking and social investments. As a result of these investments, the Foundation has learned many important lessons: (1) housing, particularly for low- and moderate-income households, is an important platform for individuals and families to achieve well-being and economic stability and (2) solutions designed with significant and meaningful input from those most affected are most likely to result in positive long-term change.

This funding opportunity is situated within the Health Program’s Community-Driven Solutions focus area defined as locally determined solutions and policies that influence systems, services, practices to help support communities to improve housing quality, stability, environmental conditions and food systems.

The Opportunity

The Kresge Foundation seeks to identify and accelerate community-led policy and system changes that reduce displacement, segregation and gentrification, support innovative funding strategies that better connect housing and health sectors and recognize multi-sector partnerships that preserve and increase the supply of stable housing for improved health, well-being and health equity in low-income communities.

Competitive proposals will meet the following criteria:

• Address upstream determinants of health;
• Have a strong community and equity focus;
• Include multi-sector involvement minimally from health and housing fields and optimally partners from additional sectors;
• Community resident-level engagement and power building at the policy and/or practice level focused on solutions to one or more health and housing issue, such as, but not limited to:
  • Physical and emotional trauma emanating from housing instability
  • Impact of displacement (fair housing, community planning, etc.)
  • Housing design/quality (addressing health conditions such as lead, asthma)

What We Will Support

On-the-Ground Work: Includes operating and programmatic grants to nonprofits who have a core mission of stabilizing communities through systems change and policy work to prevent displacement, gentrification and eviction, and to advance fair housing. This work also includes planning grants and small-scale pilots of new and innovative models of housing and health system integration and multi-sector collaborative approaches.

Intermediary Support: Includes supporting national learning collaboratives and national networks to provide diverse technical assistance strategies and customized support to local organizations. The goal of this work is to strengthen the links between local organizations and build their capacity to transform sporadic innovation into a sustained strategy. Key strategies include facilitating peer-to-peer learning and multi-sectoral collaborations. The learnings from this work are intended to inform national, state and local policy and practice.

Innovation: Includes the development of new transformative policy and financing approaches to housing and health with a goal of creating a supportive regulatory and financing environment that leads to an increased supply of stable affordable housing. Successful applicants will combine local knowledge and experience with national expertise to create, novel evidence-informed approaches that will translate in a variety of contexts (e.g., blended funding strategies that bring health care investors together with traditional investors).

What Will Not Be Supported

• For on-the-ground proposals, efforts must have a strong community engagement and power-building component;
• Proposed efforts that only involve a single organization or single sector;
• Capital costs for housing development (gap financing etc.) with grant funding;
• Pure research (as opposed to applied research) related to housing.

How to Apply

In order to be considered for funding in 2018, proposals submissions must be completed by 11:59 p.m. ET on August 13, 2018. Another round of funding in this category will be announced in mid-fall 2018 with funding in early 2019.

Click here to apply.

NOTE:  If you have not applied to the Kresge Foundation for funding previously, you must register in the FLUXX system first.  Registration can take up to 48 hours, so please take this into consideration when applying.