10 things that made us smile this week

In the first part of the docuseries, entitled “What We Came Here For,” viewers meet Tammy Granados, a young mother of four children, who experienced housing insecurity when the rent was raised on her family’s two-bedroom apartment.

Granados reached out to Four Bands Community Fund, a community development financial institution (CDFI) that helps create a path to homeownership for underserved communities and individuals—something that is particularly complicated for Native Americans.

“Most of the issues our homeowners face have to do with barriers set up around the land that we have no control over, that were set up through treaties with the US Government,” says Lakota Vogel, executive director of Four Bands Community Fund. Native communities, for instance, work through the Bureau of Indian Affairs to buy and sell tribal land rather than a traditional realtor, which can make home ownership seem even more out of reach.

“Who do you call when you want to buy a house?” says Vogel, of the typical home buying process for Native communities. “We don’t have realtor companies.”

These kinds of structural barriers, Vogel explains, put a significant strain on the health of Native communities.

“It’s like a chronic stress that’s overtop all of us, and our populations experience these unprecedented health disparities,” she says. “We adopt this scarcity mindset and our bodies sort of respond by increasing a stress hormone called cortisol. Having a home decreases that stress response.”

Four Bands not only understands these particular barriers and the harm they cause—they’re also able to help Native communities break through them.

“The first thing we do within a Native American reservation is sort of demystify the process,” Vogel says in a panel discussion led by RWJF, in partnership with Upworthy. “We look at the land site with the community member and talk them through every step of the process.” Four Bands then matches them with any available capital that will help them purchase the home.

Through a partnership with Four Bands, Granados was able to move her children into safe, secure, and affordable housing where they’re able to thrive.

“Becoming a homeowner gave me freedom to show my kids that you don’t just have to work to survive,” says Granados in the film. “You can work to thrive, you can work to live, you can work to grow your spirit, you can work doing something you enjoy. This is what your spirit came to Earth for.”

“What We Came Here For” is part one of From Hope to Home, a three-part docuseries from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Emmy®-nominated creative studio People’s Television. It is available to stream here.

“Moving Day,” the second part of the docuseries, shines a light on discriminatory housing practices in New Jersey, one of the most diverse areas in the nation—and also one of the most segregated.

“People want to be able to control where other people, especially people of color, live,” says Adam Gordon in the film, who works as the Executive Director of the Fair Share Housing Center. “The KKK didn’t want black residents to be in the same town, and yet these are still the same [rules] we use to govern our communities today,” he explains.

These discriminatory practices, known as “exclusionary zoning,” kicked off years of activism that eventually led to the New Jersey Supreme Court’s watershed Mount Laurel ruling in 1975. The ruling found that exclusionary zoning practices were unconstitutional, and declared that every town in New Jersey must provide their “fair share” of each region’s affordable housing. Organizations like the Fair Share Housing Center help enforce these housing laws and compel municipalities across New Jersey to set aside housing units for lower-income families.

Because of that ruling, more than 400,000 New Jersey citizens—like Shala Staple, who is featured in the film—can now access secure housing in neighborhoods that would otherwise be out of reach.

“Affordable housing made me feel able to provide for my children,” Staple says. “I’m just really excited for their futures.”

However, “Moving Day” shows that there is still more work to be done, as several New Jersey communities continue to push back against affordable housing mandates. Fair Share Housing Center and other advocacy groups will continue to fight to ensure every community is accessible to New Jerseyans.

“No community should be closed to anyone,” says Gordan in the post-screening panel discussion. “Every community has to do its fair share of [providing] affordable housing, and every town, even the wealthiest ones, have to be part of the solution.”

“Moving Day” is part two of From Hope to Home, a three-part docuseries from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Emmy®-nominated creative studio People’s Television. It will be available to stream here starting April 15.

Finally, in “Roses and Thorns,” director Milena Mikael-Debass shows viewers how community land trusts, or CLTs, can improve access to housing in Lynchburg, VA.

A CLT, the film explains, is a regionally-based nonprofit organization that acquires land, holds it in a trust, and then leases out the land for home-building, farming, and more. CLTs were first created in 1969 as a response to segregation under Jim Crow laws, allowing black farmers to gain equal access to farmland and black families to secure affordable housing. These trusts continue to help people like Ashleigh Bowman, a single mom of three kids, participate in home ownership when they normally would not be able to access it. Home ownership through CLTs also help marginalized communities build generational wealth.

“If something happens to me, I will be able to pass on this home to my children,” says Bowman in the film, who purchased her house through a community land trust after a life-altering event. “[They will] be able to afford it because the community land trust guarantees that this land will not be volatile with the market.”

Organizations like Grounded Solutions Network are looking to scale this type of shared equity home ownership model across the country, says Alex Cabral, Senior Principal of Innovative Finance at Grounded Solutions Network.

To do so, Grounded Solutions Network partners with other organizations and provides support like policy advocacy, education, research, and housing technology solutions to help them implement these models all over the U.S. Their latest goal is to produce one million affordable houses within the next ten years, acquiring corporate-owned rental homes and transitioning them into affordable housing opportunities across the US. This will help ensure a safer, more secure, and healthier country.

“Everyone has the right to a safe and secure home,” Cabral says. “And those who seek to be homeowners deserve that opportunity.”

“Roses and Thorns,” is part three of From Hope to Home, a three-part docuseries from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Emmy®-nominated creative studio People’s Television. It will be available to stream here starting April 22.