Our Work

Equity

Elm City Communities/Housing Authority of New Haven and New Haven Public Schools have been selected as Inaugural Member of The Bridges Collaborative – a Nationwide Initiative to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in education. The first-of-its-kind collaboration connects 55 school and housing groups from 21 states, covering 3.5 million children, and represents the most significant grassroots effort focused on school integration in decades.

Read and learn more about the collaborative and the innovative work visit the Bridges Collaborative page. View or download the full of ECC and Bridges Collaborative Partnership [PDF] press release.

Meeting people’s needs takes one major thing – equity. We not only strive to be an equitable organization, we are making the partnerships and doing the work to make it happen. This year, we have partnered with consultants from Co-Creating Effective & Inclusive Organizations (CEIO) to go through trainings to increase our internal and external equity capacities.

CEIO will help us create and implement an agency equity plan that will be based on their guiding values of conscious use of power as individuals and organizations, co-learning/teaching in communities of practice, whole systems transformation, inviting, listening, and honoring people’s stories, and through justice from equitable sharing of power throughout the community. 

Our strive towards equity also includes our partnership with The Bridges Collaborative through The Century Foundation and New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) to create more equitable outcomes for our children. For too long, the access, opportunities, and outcomes for students has been extremely contingent on things as subjective as where their homes are located. This initiative works to advance racial and socioeconomic integration and equity so that a student’s location does not determine their success.

CEIO’s Guiding Values:

• Conscious Co-Creation – conscious use of power as individuals and as organizations
• Co-learning/teaching in communities of practice
• Whole systems transformation
• Inviting, listening, honoring people’s stories
• Justice – equitable sharing of power throughout the community

Policy

The housing patterns that we see today are the intentional result of a long history of racist policy. CT remains one of the most segregated states in the country due to the combined impact of years of discriminatory governmental housing policy, banking practices, and local land use decisions. These aspects are upheld through exclusionary practices and taxation policies that we are adamantly taking action to reverse.

ECC/HANH’s Inclusive CT is an initiative for housing policy reform that seeks to blatantly name and demand the needed policy changes on the local, state, and federal levels to eliminate inequities and replace them with opportunities.

Learn more about each policy reform within Inclusive CT that we are fighting to see implemented.

Advocacy

Elm City Communities-Housing Authority of New Haven (ECC-HANH) maintains a close working relationship with our local, state and federal elected officials, which increases resources and strengthens collaborative efforts and partnerships as we move to build a better community.

We are continually monitoring the trends and emerging issues that could impact the families and individuals that we assist by; creating and preserving affordable communities of choice; providing rental assistance and opportunities for greater self-sufficiency.