About the Working Group
California is in the midst of a long-standing housing crisis, and people with disabilities continue to be among the most severely impacted. Safe, affordable, and accessible housing is fundamental to health, independence, and community inclusion—but these options are often limited or out of reach.
While efforts to preserve, produce, and protect affordable housing are happening at the local, regional, state, and federal levels, they frequently lack a disability-forward lens. Similarly, disability advocacy has not always centered housing as a core priority.
The California Disability-Forward Housing Working Group exists to bridge these gaps–bringing together housing development and policy advocates and disability rights leaders to ensure that housing solutions fully include the needs and rights of people with disabilities. Our mission is to drive policies and partnerships that make inclusive, accessible, and affordable housing a reality for all Californians.
Focus Areas
- Policy Monitoring and Information Sharing: Tracking legislation and initiatives across housing and disability rights, and ensuring timely, accessible updates for advocates, partners, and communities.
- Building a Cross-Disability Housing Movement: Strengthening the field by promoting policies and practices that are inclusive of people with all types of disabilities across housing systems.
Advancing Disability-Forward Housing Solutions: Defining priorities, driving policy change, and championing innovative interventions to expand accessible, affordable, and inclusive housing opportunities.
Values
Our work is solution-oriented and equity-focused, guided by the following core commitments:
- Lived Experience: Leadership and participation from people with disabilities—and others with related lived experiences—are essential to everything we do.
- Inclusive: Our work is grounded in the recognition of the historical and ongoing segregation and institutionalization of people with disabilities, and actively works to dismantle those systems.
- Cross-Disability: We prioritize bringing together people with all types of disabilities to build a truly inclusive and representative movement.
- Intersectional: We center the full identities of people with disabilities, including race, class, immigration status, language, gender, and other identities that shape access to housing and community living.
Solidarity, Not Competition: We reject “oppression olympics” and commit to working in solidarity with all communities disproportionately impacted by the housing crisis. We believe there is enough space—and enough urgency—for all of us to win.
Structure & Participation
We meet every quarter on the fourth Thursday from 10 AM to 11:30 AM PST. To join us, email hunter@thekelsey.org.
To request accommodations, please contact hunter@thekelsey.org 5 days before the meeting.
The bi-monthly meetings will cover current activities/priorities, active legislation, and, most importantly participant requests and agenda items. There will be a call for agenda items the second Thursday of the meeting’s month and all participants can send requests for agenda items and topics to cover by the third Thursday of the month.
We ask that all participating members attend as many meetings as possible.
What This Working Group Is & What It Is Not
- This group is cross-disability. We do not only focus on services like those offered by state developmental disability agencies, or exclusively on people with intellectual disabilities. If that is your primary focus, you should also get involved with groups specifically supporting those communities, like the Lanterman Housing Alliance.
- This group is for stakeholders with existing knowledge and/or actively working in disability rights and/or housing. This is not a general information group. If you are new to these fields, please check out our Learn Center, our Together We Can Do More report, the SCDD Statewide Strategic Framework, and The Arc for more information. If you are a person with disabilities interested in learning more about housing development and/or advocacy, sign up for our newsletters.
- This is not an information session on The Kelsey or our approach to inclusive housing. To learn more about our work, submit a request to Work With Us.