Housing
Six Months In: Building the Collaborative Foundations for Housing Affordability
June 16, 2025
By: Jacob Hunter, Lead Data and Policy Analyst, ncIMPACT Initiative
It’s been six months since the launch of Our State, Our Homes, and teams are already off to a strong, meaningful start.
This blog is meant to highlight what we’ve learned about community collaboration and what it takes to lay the groundwork for sustainable, community-driven efforts to address housing affordability challenges. As teams progress through the next 12 months of this program, it’s valuable to look back at the foundations they’ve been building and why those foundational pieces matter. We hope that these lessons will provide inspiration and direction for other communities working toward collaborative solutions to their housing challenges.
Starting with the Basics
Our State, Our Homes began in January with a kickoff webinar, where 14 teams representing 22 counties gathered for the first time. In addition to covering the logistics, we used this opportunity for teams to get to know us and each other and to lift up what made them hopeful about being part of the program. From the stories, questions, and aspirations they shared, it was clear teams were bringing high motivation, serious urgency, and a strong commitment to the work. This set the tone for the activities to come.
“What makes the Our State, Our Homes program so hopeful for me is the opportunity to connect with others who share my passion for creating meaningful change in affordable housing. Being part of this collaborative team means I don’t have to tackle these challenges alone—I’ll have the support of like-minded people and access to tools and ideas that can make a real impact.”
– An Our State, Our Homes Team Member during the kickoff webinar
After the kickoff, the teams got right to work. We asked the teams to give a name to their collaborative, reflect on who from their communities might be missing from their efforts, and gather stories of thriving with housing affordability. These early activities helped set the direction for the work ahead.
- The Who is Missing? activity helped teams think strategically about how to build stronger coalitions by widening their circles to include stakeholders they hadn’t yet reached.
- The Stories of Thriving activity reminded them that identifying new strategies to address challenges is only part of the work. Recognizing past successes and noting the conditions that made them possible is also critical.
Forum One: Trust, Understanding, and Historical Groundwork
In February, the 14 teams came together in Chapel Hill for their first in-person forum. A winter storm meant we only had one day together, but that day was well-spent with all but one team member in attendance.
The primary objectives for Forum One were to reaffirm a shared commitment to the goals of the program, build trust and community across the cohort, and develop a shared understanding of housing issues in North Carolina. Participants met with peers from other teams to discuss their local housing challenges, their hopes for the program, and their findings from the Stories of Thriving activity.
Dr. Roberto Quercia from the UNC Department of City and Regional Planning walked teams through a recent history of the current housing crisis. This session grounded our work in the broader systems and histories that shape local housing outcomes.
The conversations set teams up to begin developing standards of engagement, vision statements, and asset maps. These building block activities helped teams answer critical questions that will guide their work in the program:
- Standards of Engagement: How will we engage with one another and with our communities throughout the Our State, Our Homes program?
- Vision Statement: What is the aspirational end state that we are working toward?
- Asset Map: What are the assets that our community has to deploy to achieve our vision?
Back in Community: Building the First Layer
After Forum One, teams went back to their communities to continue to refine their standards of engagement, vision statements, and asset maps. These tools are now helping to guide decisions and keep the work grounded in shared principles.
To support the teams at this stage, we launched a series of webinars focused on critical foundational topics:
- How to Use Data to Assess Local Housing Needs – Watch Recording
- What We Mean When We Talk About Affordable Housing – Watch Recording
- Collaborating for Impact: Lessons from Housing Coalitions – Watch Recording
These sessions helped teams learn how to make sense of publicly available data, build a shared language, and understand the possibilities and challenges of cross-sector work in the housing space. Contributors included the Development Finance Initiative at the UNC School of Government, the NC Housing Coalition, the Cape Fear Housing Coalition, and Dr. Vaughn Upshaw from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Throughout these activities and events, teams continued to strengthen their habits of learning, reflection, and collaboration.
Preparing to Define and Measure Success
As we prepared for Forum Two, we asked teams to complete two pre-work assignments that would help move them deeper into their thinking about measurement and evaluation.
First, they explored a housing data dashboard created by the Development Finance Initiative. This dashboard provided county-level snapshots of local housing indicators and helped teams begin identifying their top housing priorities. In the Reacting to and Using Housing Data activity, we encouraged teams to look beyond confirmation of what they already knew by using the data to raise new questions and any surprising contradictions.
Second, we introduced the idea of a Shared Measurement System (SMS), which is a tool to track progress and impacts over the full 18 months of the program. We aim for the system to be a set of indicators co-designed with the teams to reflect shared priorities for success across the cohort, while also being flexible enough to accommodate differing local strategies.
To inform the first draft of indicators, we asked teams to inventory their existing data and potential future activities through a Preparing to Develop a Shared Measurement System activity. The full process for developing and utilizing the system is visualized below.
The SMS is not a rigid, top-down system for evaluation. Our goal is to co-design a flexible, meaningful framework that tracks collective learning and shared progress.
Forum Two: Values, Stories, and Strategy
In late May, teams returned to Chapel Hill for their second in-person forum, where they focused on the power of storytelling to shift narratives around housing. Teams learned from the display of UNC student submissions from this year’s POV Challenge as they arrived. The submissions offered inspiring examples of ways housing information might be communicated in different formats to communities.
Forum Two featured interactive sessions led by Marisol Bello of the Housing Narrative Lab, in which teams practiced communicating their housing challenges and hopes in ways that connect with core values and invite public understanding. Teams worked through prompts, shared personal and community stories, and then named the values those stories reflected. The word cloud below captures the shared values participants generated during this exercise that reflect how teams are approaching their work.
The remainder of Forum Two aimed to help teams envision possibilities and chart their path forward:
- Teams heard from organizations across North Carolina employing promising strategies for affordable development, preservation, transitional housing, supportive housing, public housing, and homeownership retention. View the full list of speakers here.
- Teams participated in a work session called Finding the Plot, where they began drafting goals that would bring their visions to life.
- A Community Goal Setting Worksheet was used to pair each goal with a potential target so that teams could start thinking about how to track success over time.
Teams also explored the first iteration of the SMS, practiced entering sample data, and provided feedback on its structure, indicators, and usability. That feedback is now helping us refine the system before the first round of data collection in July.
Lessons from the First Six Months
Throughout this process, we’ve been guided by the ncIMPACT Community Sync Model, which includes four iterative phases: Charting the Path, Framing Change, Measuring Progress, and Sustaining Your Sync. These stages provide structure, but teams are learning that this work rarely follows a linear path. The process is fluid. Teams have revisited their visions as they have engaged more partners and potential goals or strategies have taken shape. Our upcoming progress measurement cycle is sure to raise new questions that send teams back to refine their goals.
The model provides a roadmap and common language for collaboration. Some early lessons from Our State, Our Homes include:
- Trust-building is part of the work. Developing standards of engagement, vision statements, and asset maps helped teams clarify how they want to work together, not just what they want to do.
- Strategy is stronger when it is built from a foundation. By the time teams began drafting goals, they had already clarified values, identified potential assets and partners, examined local data, and explored numerous promising practices.
- Shared measurement must be co-designed. The Shared Measurement System must reflect the diversity of approaches across communities while maintaining enough cohesion to help us tell a collective story.
What’s Next?
In September, teams will gather in Chapel Hill again for Forum Three, which will focus on building strong partnerships and developing action plans to bring each team’s goals to life. These plans will draw on the vision statements, local data, community assets, and relationships they’ve been cultivating since the beginning of the program.
We will also host webinars this summer that focus on additional strategies of interest for teams, including:
- Preventing and Addressing Homelessness – Register Now for June 25!
- Manufactured Housing
- Land Trusts
We are building the foundation for collaboration within and across communities. The work ahead will be challenging as major housing funding sources face changes, but our time together has already demonstrated what is possible when local leaders have the space, structure, and support to think and work collaboratively.
We are proud of how far teams have come and are excited for what’s next. Stay tuned for more updates and to follow along with the program.
Carolina Across 100 is a five-year initiative, led by the ncIMPACT Initiative, seeking to support community-driven recovery and build sustainable efforts in all 100 counties by providing human resources, data insights, coaching, facilitation, coordination efforts, and program design. “Our State, Our Homes” is the fifth program in this larger initiative. Carolina Across 100 is funded by the Office of the Chancellor and private foundations.
The ncIMPACT Initiative coordinates Carolina Across 100. ncIMPACT is a statewide initiative launched by the UNC School of Government in 2017 to help local communities use data and evidence to improve conditions and inform decision making. Visit ncimpact.org.
