Meets Weekly @ Elevate Church, 191 N. Victory Drive Saturdays in April & May from 10am - 11:30am Affordable Housing Collaborative is a grassroots community effort, working together to create the quality of life we deserve in the place that we live and love. The expert team is made up of individuals with firsthand experience of life in low-income housing, shelter systems, or have had or are currently experiencing homelessness. You are an expert of your experience and we need you! Check out our Facebook page! Come join us for our next meeting! We’re working on creating the solutions we need with the resources we have - this is how change gets done!

www.facebook.com/AffordableHousingCollaborative

Expert Team Meeting Affordable Housing Collaborative

Expert Team Meeting Affordable Housing Collaborative Harvest from Team Meeting on Saturday, April 5th, 2014 Page 1 of 3

We went around in circle, getting acquainted with each other - shared our stories, where we came from and what brought us here. We started our check-in with how we were feeling - what our personal goals for the meeting were, who we were going to ask for help in reaching that goal and what we’d commit to in helping to make it happen. This process helped us all fully arrive as we sipped on delicious coffee donated from the Coffee Hag and enjoyed the comfortable meeting space that Elevate Church had provided us.

Goals that we identified during our check-in that we want to learn more about: ~Folks are experiencing housing needs - finding housing~Looking for partnerships - networking, community~Needing to find resources - up-to-date information, the difference between “handouts” vs. empowerment~Wanting to build some momentum to address the lack of availability, what are the zoning laws/rules around this? ~Addressing the cost of living ~Action and education to build more awareness about what we’re working on, invite more to people to join us

We discovered our common values. We began brainstorming what are the things that when push comes to shove we refuse to budge on - we were surprised by the similarities in what we shared in what guides our moral compasses:

Expert Team Meeting Affordable Housing Collaborative Harvest from Team Meeting on Saturday, April 5th, 2014 Page 2 of 3

What are the most important, most urgent issues and challenges that we are facing at this time? !

#1. Income-based, affordable, available housing that has room for large family units, that is environmentally friendly, that creates a healing environment and encourages physical activity and that provides us with long-term consistency that is accessible along transportation routes - that is what is needed.

!#2. Grievance Councils need to be formed, to help increase self-advocacy, improve education and awareness, create more transparent coordination and communication between tenants and landlords. Landlords need to stop over charging of repairs and stop doing evictions without getting all of the proper information first.

!#3. Safety and security needs to be improved. Landlord communication needs to be standardized and walk-throughs need to be supervised with proper notification of 24 hours needing to be provided to the tenant before any walk through happens.

!#4. Discrimination is causing a tremendous burden on minority populations and single men in our community.

!#5. The stress of the housing situation is impacting our health and well-being, there are people who are suffering severe complications from the ongoing stress of not knowing what, where, or how they are going to make it from one day to the next.

We continued to brainstorm and prioritize some more…

We then made commitments to follow-through on next steps, to take action - people stepped up and stepped in to commit to the following:

~co-lead the next meeting

~print and distribute fliers for the meetings

~pass this along to their church

~pass this along to ECHO Food Shelf

~pass this along to the Blue Earth County Library

~pass this along to the folks at the Salvation Army

Expert Team Meeting Affordable Housing Collaborative Harvest from Team Meeting on Saturday, April 5th, 2014 Page 3 of 3

We believe that we have what we need, right here, right now to begin working to figure out what our next steps are - so we created a list of the resources we each bring to the table and this is what we discovered:

~We are gifted at networking, writing, communication and ideas

~We speak multiple languages

~We have strong education experience and backgrounds (GIS mapping, Mental Health professional and personal experience, many people in the room have years of community development and community organizing experience!)

~We are advocates

~We have a very valuable perspective and life experience to help us as we continue moving forward

~We have relationships with multiple nonprofit and faith-based community groups and organizations along with local and statewide elected officials and representatives

~We are motivated to create the change we want to see