Under One Roof
We’re facing an affordable housing crisis in Minnesota. Year after year, both St. Paul and Minneapolis rank high as two of “the most livable cities in America.” Yet a third of residents in the Twin Cities are cost-burdened, spending 30% or more of their income on housing. And Minnesota ranks as one of the worst states when it comes to racial disparities in home ownership. TPT launched the Under One Roof initiative to raise awareness about Minnesota’s housing challenges and solutions, as well as identify the most important topics to community around affordable housing and housing justice.
In my role as Impact Producer for Under One Roof, I designed the creative content and engagement strategy for the initiative and led a cross departmental content team at Twin Cities PBS (TPT), as well as an advisory team of housing advocates. Initiated by generous funding from the Pohlad Family Foundation, the initiative challenged TPT to create a final report on what we learned from and in community and to identify actionable opportunities for TPT to lift up those topics and make the biggest impact through storytelling.
I designed a series of community conversations and listening “tools” that allowed us to deeply listen to what they had to say about housing justice and housing rights.
The initiative was also focused on raising awareness about those issues through storytelling that was responsive to what we were learning in those conversations. Strategic community partnerships allowed us to achieve our goal of listening and identifying the community’s biggest issues around housing.
Using photography, data visualization and writing, I created the final impact report and community report for Pohlad Family Foundation of our findings and multimedia storytelling.
Events sparked conversation and deepened understanding
TPT collaborated with community partners to co-create a series of events that brought hundreds of community members together to talk about what issues around affordable housing are most important.
Convenings sparked conversation and deepened understanding about affordable housing as an economic and human rights issue, the history of racially restrictive covenants in Minneapolis, renting and homeownership, homelessness and solutions.
The video (right) highlights the East Side Housing Justice event
Listening to community reveals important insights on housing
With this project, TPT’s Under One Roof team had a unique opportunity: to listen. Using a human-centered design approach, the team listened deeply to what community had to say about the state of affordable housing in Minnesota. We discovered what issues mattered most and why, and built relationships with organizations, community members and leaders in housing.
The events also inspired action in the community. The East Side Housing Summit sparked the birth of the East Side Housing Justice group and influenced housing policy on the East Side of Saint Paul.
Five key topics emerged:
Racial disparities,
homelessness,
renter and homeowner resources,
innovative solutions,
and community action
We invited participation in a variety of ways including sharing thoughts through art, small group discussion, writing, surveys and video storytelling. At these events, we gathered over 1,000 insights from community members, tenants, homeowners, landlords, men and women experiencing homelessness, youth, policy-makers and organizers.
What People Shared
“Housing is a basic human right, not a privilege.”
— Aarica C.
“Shouldn't happen TO but WITH. We’ve lived the answers that we seek.”
— East Side Housing Summit Attendee
“How we build housing is how we build community.”
— East Side Housing Summit Attendee
“Transformation is change that never goes back to the way it used to be.”
— Rocki S.
Storytelling amplifies community concerns on housing
Original content amplified voices and highlighted the complexity of those experiencing housing insecurity, homelessness, and housing inequity.
As our team was learning from and with community, we were creating content based on what we heard, and sharing it in a new collection on TPTOriginals.org. The Under One Roof Collection unpacks the complexity of our state's affordable housing challenges from a variety of perspectives.
The collection has garnered over 20,000 pageviews on the site and close to 600,000 impressions on social media.
What we learned from community
Housing is a nuanced and complex topic that requires thoughtful, ongoing, storytelling. Media has powerful potential for impact and for uplifting the marginalized, if done the right way. It can uplift people into making the changes that they want to see... change led by them and for them.
Multimedia content credit:
The Under One Roof initiative at Twin Cities PBS