Research Team: Jane Booth-Tobin & Naomi Joseph with Hahrie Han
Research Partner: The Homes Guarantee Campaign of the Tenant Union Federation
Key questions: How did the Homes Guarantee campaign’s strategic and structural choices shape the options available to them?
Research Products: Centering Tenant Leadership to Build Federal Power
Description:
This report describes the work of the Homes Guarantee campaign to experiment with new approaches to building effective and powerful federal coalitions in an effort to win guaranteed housing in the United States. We track choices the campaign made from 2018 to 2022 about how to organize itself and what resources to leverage for power alongside
the impact it was having in the world, finding that three key decisions shaped the ability of
the campaign to expand its impact:
- To see organized bases of tenants in member organizations rather than individual activists as their source of power;
- To center their base of tenants as decisionmakers and lead strategists while retaining important roles for staff organizers, policy experts, and funders in the coalition;
- To develop an explicit governance structure that allowed the campaign to more fully inhabit these choices.
Many campaign reports focus on what a campaign accomplished in the world, putting a black box around the campaign’s internal practices and operations. In this report, we specifically highlight how external impacts and internal decisions evolved alongside each other for Homes Guarantee— because what the campaign was able to accomplish depended on how they did the work.
How they organized themselves internally affected to whom they were accountable, how they developed strategy, and, ultimately, what they accomplished in the world. The campaign’s journey reveals the ways in which the three critical decision points listed above transformed both their internal operations and external impact: first, recognizing that their power must come from organized bases of tenants rather than individual activists; second, truly centering tenants as decision-makers while maintaining clear roles for staff and experts; and finally, creating explicit governance structures that allowed them to fully implement these choices. By illuminating these pivotal choices and their consequences, we hope to generate learnings on how to advance a federal campaign for funders and community organizers seeking to build federal coalitions.
