Michael Durham is a national leader who has fought all his life for housing justice and solutions to homelessness.
Durham’s parents served as missionaries in Switzerland and Holland and settled in Nashville when he was six years old. He became interested in the plight of people experiencing homelessness early on and started homelessness outreach through his church when growing up. After studying political science in Chattanooga, he returned to attend Divinity School at Vanderbilt University, which he called a “movement seminary.”
“Many in the homelessness advocacy community have passed through Vanderbilt Divinity School,” said Durham, who has recently served as the board president of The Village at Glencliff, a local medical respite program for people experiencing homelessness.
After graduation, he worked at the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, which is headquartered in Nashville for nine years before moving on to take a job as the Director of Networks with Funders Together to End Homelessness, which changed its name last year to Funders Together for Housing Justice.
Tell us about what your organization does and why it changed its name.
Funders Together for Housing Justice is an association of foundations and other grant makers across the country who work across the spectrum of housing precarity from homelessness services to homelessness prevention to more structural interventions like social housing or rent control or affordable housing development.
We changed our name in the middle of last year to catch up to the way that we have been conceptualizing our core focus for many years beforehand. The term “housing justice” has really come into the zeitgeist just in the last handful of years. I think it still means different things to different people. But for us, it’s meant to connote a couple of different things. One, that no work to end homelessness is effective or ethical without a sincere commitment to racial justice, [meaning] that homelessness is the product of structural racism. That’s what the justice part is meant to convey.
It’s also meant to convey that reparations are owed. Both in the literal sense in terms of reparations for slavery, and also in the broader sense of being reparative. Philanthropy’s role, especially because its wealth is rooted in the same systems that we are trying to address – philanthropy owes repair for all the harms it’s caused. Because homelessness is the product of conscious policy decisions, we have to repair and reverse those decisions in order to achieve housing justice.
Finally, the other component that housing justice is meant to convey is that we have to dismantle all of the systems that produce homelessness in the first place and not simply just move people inside. So, definitely a focus on prevention is implied in our name change.
And what we do is … we are the national body that convenes, educates and mobilizes foundations to be more effective with their grantmaking and all of their power and influence in the work of housing justice.
Let’s talk about the dismantling of institutional racism in the nonprofit sector. When we talk about institutional racism in the nonprofit sector, what are we really talking about?
I think that this requires a lot of nuance. Because in a certain sense, when we’re talking about nonprofits embodying institutional racism, that should be no surprise, because we live in a racist country in which black and brown and indigenous people are considered second-class citizens. In that sense, you would expect that any institution that exists in the United States would reflect the racism that describes the entire country.
But I think that there is actually something quite distinct about the ways in which nonprofits embody institutional racism. Because as organizations that purport to be mission-focused, they capitalize on the goodwill and the sense of responsibility of those they employ to do work that is making a difference in the world. They get away with really harmful practices like drastically underpaying their workforce and exploiting the mission commitment that their employees embody. So there’s something particularly sinister about the ways that nonprofits embody racist practices.
Another way that this is manifested is that, unlike [in] the for-profit workforce or the corporate world, actually women occupy more leadership positions; but almost entirely white women [are] in these leadership positions. So the nonprofit workforce is maybe more diverse than the for-profit workforce, at least the corporate workforce, but those in leadership positions are still overwhelmingly white folks. So there is this really interesting nuance of white feminism that shows up in the nonprofit sector that we definitely need to confront.
To answer your question, what are we really talking about when we’re talking about institutional racism? We’re talking about how nonprofits embody all of the racist ideology that is descriptive of our culture at large but weaponizing that against people who feel they have no other choice in their life than to do work that is for their black and brown siblings and oppressed people.
What do you see happening across the nation since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Grants Pass v. Johnson and essentially determined that the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment does not prevent a city from enforcing a ban on public encampments?
I want to be really clear that it is true that the Grants Pass decision was apocalyptic for the homelessness advocacy community. I think the primary effect of it was that it gave permission to government entities at all levels – state, local, county, etc. – to lock people up for living outside. It has been devastating. Probably the most concrete example of that is how even so-called progressive leaders, like Governor Newsom in California, for example, have taken that and run with it and use that as a tool to expand incarceration as a response to homelessness.
But what is also true is that homelessness was already criminalized. Every county in the United States used incarceration as a tool, as a weapon really, against unhoused people. Certainly black and brown people and indigenous people who are homeless were already living under this apartheid where the police harassed them for living where they were.
So I just want to be clear that it’s both of those things. Yes, Grants Pass was terrible, but things were really terrible before then, too.
Are our homelessness systems truly connecting with the health care systems in a way that is beneficial to people experiencing homelessness?
I would imagine if you asked the major health systems or MCOs (Managed Care Organizations) across the country this question, they would say, of course, that there was a lot more work to be done, but that they have taken great strides to make the healthcare system work better for people who are homeless. But I doubt anybody living outside really feels that.
So we’ve seen really well-known MCOs and hospital systems make big grants for nonprofits who work on homelessness, embrace initiatives like FUSE — Frequently Used Systems Engagement — or other initiatives that work to address the social determinants of health. Health systems are much more accustomed to housing as a social determinant of health. In some ways, that’s been embraced in policy, like in California, where there’s different provisions now to use Medicaid dollars to fund services, including rental assistance or medical respite care that address the non-medical factors that affect people who are homeless.
But because of the way our health system is set up, which is a for-profit industry where competing agencies — even if they are technically nonprofit hospitals themselves — are ultimately looking to make profits [and] address their bottom line. The system is intentionally complex, so that ultimately, if somebody’s sleeping outside in Nashville tonight, they may now have access to a street medic that comes out every other Thursday that a certain hospital is able to pilot. But that’s doing very little to benefit their overall experience of being homeless.
That was a long-winded way of saying there has been a lot of improvement. Hospitals are investing in things like medical, respite, or recuperative care at unprecedented levels. And those are life-saving interventions, but they are not the structural interventions that would actually benefit people who are outside tonight.
In your view, how could street outreach and encampment closures be strengthened? Or do you believe the current approaches, as implemented by Nashville and other cities, are sufficient?
Again, we need nuance here. I think it is really important to be clear that nobody thinks that encampments are a good thing. Nobody wants encampments outside of their homes, and people don’t want to be sleeping outside. The people who live in encampments don’t want to be homeless. And for communities who are responsible for managing encampments — Continuums of Care, city government, etc. — I want to acknowledge that they only have bad options. By the time people are sleeping outside, we have already failed them in so many ways. And the only meaningful and humane way to close encampments is to prevent people from sleeping outside in the first place.
But by the time encampments are formed, they can provide really meaningful community and safety and some sort of predictability and routine for people who choose to live in them, as opposed to living isolated on the street, having to move constantly from place to place. And to evict somebody from the encampment literally is no different than if I came to your house, I threw all of your stuff into a dumpster, and I slapped you with a big fine that you will never be able to pay, and therefore, there is a warrant out for your arrest because you’re in violation of the law. That is what it is like to evict people from encampments.
So what Nashville has done, again, to be clear, is not unique compared to other cities. Even the most progressive cities in the country are still evicting people from their homes. I mean, there was news last week that Mayor Mamdani, our first socialist mayor in the biggest city in the country, has returned to encampment closures that had been postponed against the advice of all the homelessness advocacy community there. So I don’t want to characterize Nashville’s approach as especially problematic.
However, it is definitely the case that police should not be involved in encampment closures at all. And in my view, not be involved in homelessness services in any capacity because they always escalate situations and further run the risk of embroiling people in carceral systems that only make their homelessness work.
Encampments should not be closed unless people have a stable housing option to be referred to. I don’t want to suggest that it’s simple, because maybe there are conditions that make encampments just really not ideal to be living there. But it’s just really important to remember that people aren’t choosing to live outside, and they only have bad options. And so, to evict people from where they are, the only stable place that they’re able to build a tiny community is of violence.
So no, our approaches are not sufficient. I want to acknowledge here too, there are a lot of nuanced, different takes about the role of so-called sanctioned encampments. What the National Health Care for the Homeless Council has actually coined as temporary supported communities. For many, these are just outdoor shelters that operate in the same sort of carceral ways and punitive ways that shelters often can. But for others, they provide some sort of stability where at least folks who live there know that they’re not going to be evicted because their presence has been authorized in a certain respect. I want to acknowledge that in the absence of permanent supportive housing, it may be the case that we need to stand up more interim housing options, but they should always be provided voluntarily and not coercively.
Do you want to elaborate more about better options?
It’s really nuanced because shelters do not end homelessness. I am not advocating that we need to build more shelters or expand shelter capacity. Because every dollar we put in a shelter, we could have been putting into permanent housing. It is also the reality under our current conditions that makes affordable housing development so difficult and so expensive that it could be a more humane option to use hotels or other interim options for folks, so long as they are offered voluntarily.
You mentioned prevention earlier. Is there a solution to encampments without prevention efforts?
We are not going to solve outdoor homelessness or encampments until we prevent homelessness in the first place. You can move them out of town and out of the view of tourists, but that’s not doing anything other than displacing people, which actually makes their living situations more dire, more deadly, and will prolong their homelessness.
It’s actually cheaper, ultimately, to prevent homelessness before it starts. Having some sort of universal rental assistance or housing voucher or guaranteed basic income would be a far cheaper solution to help keep people housed and meet their own needs than all the infrastructure we have stood up to serve people once they’ve already reached rock bottom.
Actually, there are programs like Denver Basic Income that just give cash to people who are already homeless. [While] that’s not homelessness prevention, it has proven to be a much more effective way to resolve homelessness for people. Because homelessness ultimately is about an inability to compete in the housing market. It’s about the distance between your income and the rent. So we can make rent less expensive, we can do things on that side, or we can put more cash in people’s wallets to help fill that gap. But that’s the gap that we’re trying to cover for.