On Housing & Community

I am an artist, fair & affordable housing advocate, and documentarian. I combine visual art with ethnographic media, including audio interviews, household objects, and photographs, to explore how our individual ideas of home situates into our shared sense of community.

Photograph taken by Patricia Trafton, founder of SoapBox Arts in Burlington, VT

“Home” is the theme which threads together my art, my community projects, and my employment. My marketing, outreach, and service methods are guided by my background in documentary storytelling, the arts, and my passion to promote housing security for all. I find overlap in my roles as a community organizer, advocate, and visual artist, and strength in the unique positioning of my roles to reach community members often on the fringes of our neighborhoods.

residents make tiles for Laurentide project

fabrication for Laurentide project

Housing Resources (Vermont Based)

Housing Demystified: Housing Demystified is a 4-part series I helped write, which provides an overview of Vermont's housing landscape, and our network of housing organizations.

Fair Housing Fridays: FAIR HOUSING FRIDAYS is a series of informational, recorded panel conversations which take a creative look at housing topics, and is hosted by the Fair Housing Project of CVOEO.

MoreThanFour: morethan4vt.org is a public education and engagement campaign powered by a coalition of Vermont non-profit organizations whose missions include the promotion of equitable opportunities for affordable housing.

Housing Advocate Since 2015

I joined the realm of affordable and Fair housing advocacy in 2015 as an AmeriCorps Community Organizer for the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition, a statewide membership organization with a mission to represent that policy needs to support and further the work of our state's affordable housing developers, provider, and related services. I have since worked with domestic violence shelters, community centers, food shelves, mentorship programs for incarcerated folks, and residents from a variety of affordable housing developments.

Projects include:

Founded, funded, and managed the Voices of Home project
Founded, funded, and manage Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing, a public art project using opportunities to connect community members to housing resources
Providing outreach & education around Fair and inclusive housing with CVOEO's Fair Housing Project
Teaching Tenant Skills and Fair Housing in workshops with CVOEO's Vermont Tenants and Fair Housing Project

organized a pen-pal project for the affordable senior community with subsidized family housing across the street when the residents had to move into their new homes without their loved ones at the onset of COVID
Facilitate critical housing discussion with community leaders, policy makers, and other advocates for Fair Housing Month
Connect community members of all different ages and backgrounds to Fair Housing curriculum through art activities for Fair Housing Month

Regardless of the role, the location, or the population I am working with, the goal remains the same- connect people to the resources they need, and connect people to each other.

Why Art and Housing/Community Organizing

Layn, Fair Housing Month art kit response, '22

Declan, Fair Housing Month response, '22

Myah, Fair Housing Month art kit response, '22

When we talk about home, we rarely expand beyond the “brick and mortar” of housing.

Sometimes the overlooked parts of our neighborhood infrastructure become invitation for other forms of attention, connection, and individual agency

Seven years in the housing field has instilled a dedication to the spaces which provide those subtle, critical elements of home which are easily overlooked- a sense of stability, agency, and belonging. For people who have endured barriers to accessing stable housing, home may not fit into our traditional expectations around housing. What is home for someone who has been displaced many times over?

We need to expand our housing vocabulary.

Our verbal and written language can be limiting in conveying complex ideas. I notice a pattern in our vocabulary as housing advocates. Not only do we default to inaccessible terms, but many of the housing phrases we use already evoke binary and polarized assumptions. Public art can position home as both essential and deeply personal, as a sense of stability and connection within the encompassing community network.

Home is more than the physical structures we erect, but is a sense of consistency and agency, a place for authentic unguarded expression.

Community members at the Old North End Community Center gather to create prints for the mural project, led in collaboration with students from Burlington City & Lake Semester

My Skin in the Game

After almost three decades of housing insecurity, my partner and I were able to purchase our first home this past year. Assisted by first-time homeownership programs, federal grants, luck, and the enduring love of my neighbors, we bought our home during a moment when renters face rising rents, no-cause evictions, and ultimately displacement. Homeownership has instilled in me a sense of belonging and personal agency that I did not grow up with. It has taken some time to realize, but now I understand my drive to continue housing advocacy- which is not without its challenges- stems from a desire to locate my own narrative in my community, and to feel a sense of control in my personal history of displacement. Housing stability has allowed me to develop a trusting relationship with the practitioners who oversee my physical and mental health, after being diagnosed with a chronic autoimmune disease. Housing stability has allowed me to access the financial resources I needed to respond to a variety of challenges stemming from growing up in financial precarity, including credit problems from identity theft, accessing a driver's license through disability support services, and scholarships to complete my education. Housing stability has been foundational to growing my supportive community, who arrives when I am in crisis, who grieves my losses with me, and who celebrates my successes. Because I have housing security, I know who is advocating for people like me in my neighborhood and state. I know where to buy my groceries, I have access to transportation, and should an unexpected need ever arrive, I know my community can connect me to the appropriate resource. Housing is central to our livelihoods, and housing choice- for all - is a right that I am dedicated to advocating for.

The way we create communities around access and care has resounding effects. It’s our responsibility to make accessible the resources we benefit from to the people who need them most.