Welcome Home has been busy advocating to ensure any changes made to our local funding for homeless services and affordable housing make the greatest impact in our region. Last week, Metro Council agreed to allocate more time to improving the Supportive Housing Services Measure before bringing it to the voters. With so much at stake for our neighbors needing housing, we are grateful that the council is allocating more time to make sure there is larger agreement across jurisdictions and coalitions on what is brought to voters.
With federal funding for human services being actively threatened this week, we are so grateful that our region has local funding to take care of our neighbors experiencing challenges. There is broad agreement among government agencies and advocates that more streamlined regional planning and governance and an extension of the tax timeline will create stability and have a greater impact on our neighbors facing homelessness and housing instability. Welcome Home is in conversation with the Coalition of Communities of Color, the Portland Metro Chamber, and Here Together to reach a consensus on the specifics such as the tax rate, the use of funds, and governance. You can read our joint letter to Metro Council below:
Welcome Home is committed to ensuring that community members and workers closest to the issue help shape new proposal agreements. In 2025, Welcome Home’s Supportive Housing Services workgroup will convene our members to stay abreast and involved in this work. We all want to see this invaluable local resource continue and live up to its full potential. If you are interested in joining our housing justice movement, follow the link below to learn more.
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We also want to acknowledge and validate our collective anxiety about the Executive Orders that the White House has been issuing at a breakneck speed. To be clear, this is strategic. The plan is to overwhelm us – when humans face information overload, we disengage and become passive. We want to send love and care to everyone right now and offer the gentle reminder that you can pick just a few issues you care deeply about and trust others are focusing their attention on other pressing matters. Our focus is our resistance.
For Welcome Home, we will focus on policies affecting access to housing and support other efforts by joining and endorsing broader coalitions fighting for social justice. We have joined Oregon for All and Food for All Oregonians, two state-wide initiatives to protect immigrant and refugee rights.