Rhode Island Housing started HousingWorks as a campaign to educate the public and particularly the business community about a rapidly emerging economic development problem, the state's workforce housing crisis.
This crisis is not just about housing. It has negative consequences for the quality of our health care (hospitals are the state's biggest employers), the success rates of our schools, and our state's economic growth.
Rhode Island Housing started the ball rolling. The agency put a huge amount of resources into this effort and attracted the attention of key policymakers.
At roughly the same time, The Rhode Island Foundation and the United Way of Rhode Island noticed that affordable housing had become a large and increasingly urgent issue for many of their grant recipients. The two funding agencies convened a coalition of stakeholders to search for solutions.
The Rhode Island Housing initiative and the interests of the two major funders converged and HousingWorks RI in its current form was born.
