We took off the month July but have jumped back in with vigor as summer begins to wind down.
Highlights
If you haven’t visited our website lately, we have revised and updated our Mission Statement. This is an important change for us because it will allow us to advocate for limited-equity cooperative housing irrespective of a physical site and improve our odds of qualify for grant funding.
We’re very excited to announce we have added four new members to our team! We have two new board members, Amber Cox, a senior housing expert, and Dallas Richard, an urban planning and marketing expert, bringing our numbers to seven! Kenya Hodo is signing on as one of our first committee volunteers to help with both our fall fundraiser and upcoming events. And, to round out our expanded team, we have a new General Counsel, Kathleen Manchin. We are very excited to welcome them all and to have such a highly qualified and expanded team tackling our many next steps!
As we reported in our last newsletter, we were thrilled the City of Austin Planning Commission recently passed a resolution prioritizing the development of limited-equity senior housing coops on City-owned tracts within ETODs. The resolution is now in the hands of the City Council Housing and Planning Committee for discussion and approval at their August 28th meeting before being passed along to the full council for action, hopefully no later than October.
Regarding the resolution, please watch for more information as we get closer to the date.
St. David’s Foundation just released a Housing + Health call. Our friends at UTRGV and the Austin Creative Alliance are collaborating with us to respond.
Other News & Announcements
The Austin Housing Coalition, along with the AIA and Housing Works Austin, is hosting “HOT TAKES ON HOUSING: A MAYORAL AND CITY COUNCIL CANDIDATE FORUM” on Thursday, September 5th, from 5 to 8 PM at Assembly Hall, 1121 E 7th St. Please RSVP via Eventbrite and plan to attend!
Low Lights
We heard back from Austin Community Foundation with a denial to our recent funding request. We made the request before we changed our mission statement earlier this summer and much of our request was based on needs dependent upon a successful outcome at Ryan Drive. We will try again next spring, now that we no longer need to tie funding requests to a physical project.
Thank Yous
Many thanks to everyone who is helping bring this model into being—past and present. Yes, we still have a way to go, but we would not be this far along with the contributions of each of you.