From Colonization to Crisis: National Chaos, Local Action

As communities across the nation face the overlapping crises of housing, democracy, and belonging, this session invites participants to trace today’s housing crisis back to its roots in colonization. Together, we will name how systems built on dispossession and racial hierarchy continue to shape our policies, our landscapes, and our relationships, and imagine what repair and justice might require of us now.

Participants will:

• Connect the dots between colonization and today’s housing unaffordability and houselessness crisis.
• Examine how unhealed racialized trauma—individual, cultural, and systemic—continues to manifest in policy and planning, even within progressive movements.
• Deepen understanding of exclusionary housing histories and how housing has been used to enforce race, class, and gender hierarchy.
• Explore what repair looks like through healing-centered, reparative practices within ourselves, our work, and our communities.
• Center anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity as essential contexts, and practice antiracism as daily, embodied work.
• Build curiosity around what housing justice could look like—not just as policy reform, but as power building, community building, and movement building.

Facilitators: Jessica A.S. Letaw & Yodit Mesfin Johnson, FutureRoot

When: Thursday, December 11, 2025 | 10 AM – 12 PM

Where: NonProfit Enterprise At Work (NEW)'s South Conference Room. 1100 N. Main Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Cost: Sliding scale from $25–$75