Leveraging Community-Based Media to Promote Equitable Homeownership

A Q&A with Lynnette McRae and Lauren Woods

Black and Latinx Chicagoans face a myriad of challenges in accessing homeownership. These include a lack of affordable homes, competitive market conditions, and inequitable access to mortgage lending. However, when the Connecting Capital and Community (3C) team at The Chicago Community Trust hosted conversations and focus groups with community residents and stakeholders, it became clear that buying a home is not simply a financial matter. Psychological, educational, and cultural factors shape residents’ first-time and even first-generation home-buying journeys.

As a part of its priority to increase the pipeline of potential homeowners of color, 3C partnered with the Trust’s Building Collective Power team to create a funding program to support community-based media solutions to raise awareness about the unique experiences, challenges, and opportunities Black and Latinx residents face on their journeys to homeownership.

In August, the Trust provided $400,000 in grants to seven media makers. In this Q&A, 3C Program Director Lynnette McRae and Building Collective Power Program Manager Lauren Woods share insights into the program.

What was the inspiration for this funding program?

Lynnette McRae: Talking to Black and Latino residents on the West Side, something I kept hearing was, ‘Homeownership just isn’t for me; it isn’t even something I had considered as a possibility.’ That got us thinking about what might be some ways that we could challenge those perceptions. And what better way to do that than lifting up the voices of folks who have successfully made that journey, folks who look like them and come from the same communities?

When we got to the question of “how,” we realized we could build on the relationships and expertise Lauren and others at the Trust have with media partners and Black and Brown voices across the city. We thought this could be a great way to leverage that network and amplify community voices.

When we talk about homeownership, there are many big ideas and elements to it that can be hard to follow. It can get very wonky and technical, so we also thought this could be an opportunity for us to, again in a very accessible way, work with partners to break down what is behind some of the challenges or the things we think when we see the statistics about the racial homeownership gap—partners who could help us to work through that noise and understand the issues behind it.

Lauren Woods: Where we come in with Building Collective Power and thinking about our Media Makers, in particular, is how we create the conditions to amplify stories to share information and to meet the information needs of residents so that they can participate in these conversations. The seed was planted to lean on Media Makers as narrators that can help support the various approaches to reducing the racial and ethnic wealth gap and the various initiatives within Community Impact.

What kinds of media makers and media organizations are the Trust funding through this program?

Lauren: What’s exciting about this opportunity is it was an open RFP, and we got to learn how various organizations see ways they can be content creators by leaning into their expertise to develop media, stories, and information around homeownership.

Some grant recipients are currently part of our network, like La Raza, where we’re helping expand their existing work by creating a Spanish-language toolkit to support their audience and readers to learn more about homeownership. Block Club, which does daily deep reporting on a digital platform, will use grant dollars to increase coverage on issues related to housing and homeownership across their various bureaus. They also are dedicating a page or section on their landing page, almost like a dashboard, to pull together all their stories and resources around housing so that residents will have a go-to place.

Then you have organizations like Injustice Watch, specializing in deep, long-form investigations. They are looking into the role the courts have in broadening or protecting Black and Latinx homeownership access and rights. We know, particularly with the history in Chicago, that the courts have expanded the rights for Black homeownership, so that was important.

Lynnette: I’m excited about Borderless and the project they’re doing. They predominantly focus on immigrant communities and already have a partnership with a Mexican-American artist where they’ve been doing pop-ups in different communities. What they plan on doing through this grant is to use that installation to bring folks in to have a conversation about what home means. They’re also planning on canvassing, going door-to-door, and showing up at different community events to get peoples’ first-hand accounts of their housing and homeownership experiences, needs, challenges, and stories.

Is there anything else people should know?

Lynnette: This is a pilot and, in many ways, is a huge learning opportunity. We look forward to iterating on the design and being able to lean into our partners, our Media Makers, to help us do that.

Lauren: Each Media Maker has a different approach and design. That diversity, layered with the specificity of focusing on homeownership, makes for a fascinating philanthropic experiment. By giving the microphone back to residents and what we hear they need, we are not relying solely on our expertise as grant makers or issue experts. We’re honing our expertise as listeners.