East Bay Housing Organizations (EBHO)
Project: Strategic Planning
For nearly 40 years, East Bay Housing Organizations (EBHO) and its network of members have advocated to produce, preserve, and protect affordable housing opportunities for low-income communities in the East Bay.
EBHO’s staff and membership base grew since its prior strategic plan, and the pandemic affected the way the organization was conducting its advocacy and organizing work. In addition, the organization was grappling with how to continue orienting around a justice framework and have its diverse staff advance a pro-Black and intersectional approach to the work. EBHO needed to both clarify its role and the role of its members in the housing justice movement and determine priorities that best position it to promote the production, preservation, and protection of affordable housing in the most effective ways.
The Lyons-Newman team engaged EBHO’s staff and board at their annual retreat, and then listened to the voices of community members and EBHO’s members in interviews, a survey, and focus groups. With EBHO’s strategic planning committee, we digested this information and used interactive online tools to generate ideas to forward our conversations and brainstorm about priorities for EBHO’s future. The committee then used that to craft EBHO’s new strategic plan.
EBHO’s four-year strategic plan includes refreshed identity statements, including a new theory of change and intended impact, and commits it to priorities that the board and staff are aligned and driven to implement together, including deepening impact in East Bay cities, shifting local electoral decision-making power and representation in policy leadership, fortifying and diversifying the housing justice movement and the affordable housing field by embodying collaborative and equity-centered goals and values, and changing broader housing systems, resources, and policies towards holistic and equitable ways of building communities.