Blog: Housing Organizing Across the Northeast 🏡
By Tony Byrne & Brandi Panbach
Montgomery for All Steering Committee Volunteers
Photo of Boston homes by Brandi!
Last month, we (Brandi and Tony!) traveled to Boston for the northeast regional gathering of Welcoming Neighbors Network, a coalition of like-minded pro-housing groups across the country.
In discussions with advocates from communities similar to Montgomery County, we learned some useful tidbits that relate directly to you, dear reader:
As social networks continue to supplant traditional news outlets, those venues become increasingly important for organizing. If you’re active on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, or others, and have ideas about how to share our message, we’d like to chat with you! Simply reply to this email.
Many of the peer organizations we met with offer their members welcome orientations and education on pro-housing topics, both virtually and when possible in-person. We’re working on bringing more of these opportunities to Montgomery for All! Let us know what you’re most interested in.
Housing is top-of-mind for a wider swath of community members than may currently be engaging with our work directly—or even know about it. There’s a large, untapped pool of housing-curious citizens out there! In this election cycle, we saw housing appear on nearly all candidate platforms. We’ll continue to find ways to engage our communities at large around these issues and provide you tools to do so individually.
Many of you would like to check out feature stories that highlight housing issues in Montgomery County as well as success stories from other counties similar to ours. We recommend becoming a member of Montgomery for All to join our Slack and discuss interesting stories + articles with our member community!
Most of all, we were energized to hear about state and local-level victories by our peers up and down the East Coast. Pro-housing, pro-smart growth wins are happening all over—and with the above strategies and more, we plan to keep winning here too! Thanks for being part of the fight.
Photo credit: Brandi Panbach
