SV@Home has developed two timely training programs in response to concerns we’ve heard from across our membership, including organizations and community members, neighbors, and advocates, and reinforced by our own local research with focus groups. We are finding that the public is deeply concerned about homelessness and housing affordability, but they’re confused about what we mean when we talk about affordable housing. They’re not seeing a connection between building affordable housing and addressing homelessness or housing affordability. 

To address these concerns, we developed two trainings: Foundations of Affordable Housing and How We Talk About Affordable Housing. The Foundations training is a program that empowers community members with specific core content to inform their understanding, response, and advocacy. A better understanding of what affordable housing is and how it meets our communities’ needs will build community support to advance our shared goals: building and preserving more affordable housing and preventing homelessness and displacement of our community members. Building this strong foundational knowledge about the value of affordable housing also lays the groundwork to pass a critical regional bond measure in 2024 to fund affordable housing and tenant protections. The need for more affordable housing resources is critical, and the bond measure can help address this regional challenge at a regional scale.

Our How We Talk About Affordable Housing program is a messaging training that equips advocates with the necessary definition, messaging framework, and responding techniques to engage in thoughtful conversations around the value of affordable housing. We understand first-hand how challenging conversations around affordable housing can be, with the amount of confusion and misconceptions on what it even is that exists in our ecosystem, so we hope that this training can help clarify those questions and make these conversations simpler and more accessible.

If you are interested in bringing one of these two new trainings to your organization or community, reach out to alison@siliconvalleyathome.org re: the Foundations training or fatima@siliconvalleyathome.org re: the messaging training.