The Ford Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have announced $7.5 million in seed funding to launch the HouseUS Fund.

Based at the Amalgamated Foundation, the pooled fund will provide multiyear, unrestricted grants and capacity-building support to grassroots and community-led organizations addressing the housing crisis. Funding includes $5.5 million from the Ford Foundation, with $4 million from the proceeds of the foundation's historic social bond sales, and $2 million over the next two years from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The fund will work to center those who have experienced housing insecurity first-hand in its grantmaking and to advance housing justice at the state, local, and federal levels. In addition, it will assist multi-issue, diverse, and intersectional community organizations working to move from a culture and system that treats housing as a market-based commodity to one where access to safe, permanently affordable housing is seen as a right for all people and a priority for policy makers.

"We recognize that this is a moment for real, lasting change at the federal level that centers racial justice in housing policy, and HouseUS will continue prioritizing the voices, policies, and decision-making of the organizers and leaders fighting for housing justice," said HouseUS Fund co-director Kevin Simowitz. "Ensuring the centrality of strategic decision making by those with lived experience of housing insecurity is the essential ingredient to transformative change at local, state, and federal levels."

"Improving the health of people in communities starts with ensuring they have a safe, dignified, stable place to call home," said RWJF senior vice president of program Donald Schwarz. "We support HouseUS in their effort to create bold, systemic change to address historic harms in housing — including racial segregation — that still, today, impact who has a fair and just opportunity for health and well-being."

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