Multidisciplinary Network Approaches to Policy Advocacy

Author: Brett Green

Participants

1. Valerie Hunt, President, Center for Equitable Policy in a Changing World
2. Richard Sharp, Vice President, Treasurer, Center for Equitable Policy in a Changing World
3. Sean Watkins, Center for Equitable Policy in a Changing World
4. Patrick Zimmerman, Vice President, Secretary, Center for Equitable Policy in a Changing World

Session Summary

To strengthen the affordable housing efforts of the city of Seattle, this team at the Center for Equitable Policy in a Changing World framed housing as a human right, and used that perspective to define goal outcomes in affordability, equity, and stability in housing. Using this perspective, they developed a community-based network model to examine the community relationships in terms of their access to resources, diversity, and similarly related variables.

Themes

1. Housing should be treated as a human right.
2. Equitability in housing follows from establishing housing is a human right.
3. Communities’ relationships and similarities in terms of housing access help us to understand where we need continued work.

Takeaways

1. Affordable and equitable housing should be a human right, not merely a commodity.
2. We can better understand housing equity by resolving equity in terms of community relationships as well as a function of geographic location.

Key Words

1. Affordable housing
2. Equitable housing
3. Stable housing
4. Displacement risk
5. Access to opportunity
6. Network theory
7. Policy
8. Multidisciplinary
9. Seattle