Kadisha Davis is a Housing Policy Fellow of the Family Homelessness Coalition, and she knows the subject better than most. As a homeless person, she interacted with the broken systems that are meant to help people with housing insecurity, and that experience fuels her fight for better and fairer approaches.
Additionally, Davis shares her wisdom as part of the Community Advisory Group (CAG) of the Financial Security Program at the Aspen Institute. She not only informs the program’s research, activities, and publications, but shares her expertise with policymakers.
Homelessness, Davis says, isn’t just something that happens to others. “People, no matter where they are in life, can fall at any point,” she notes. “They can have something one day and lose it the next, or be healthy one day and sick the next.”
Davis recently sat for a video discussion of her life, her work, and the realities of housing precarity. This transcript has been lightly edited.
Q: What led you to this kind of advocacy, and to the beliefs you have and the actions you take?
A: I came into this work by accident. I do content creation on Youtube and made a video trying to help people by talking about my homeless journey. Someone reached out to me and asked, “Do you want to do a public service announcement?” I wasn’t sure at first, but I met them in person, and since 2019 I’ve been working with the Family Homeless Coalition (FHC) doing organizing, leading rallies, and hosting the Hear Our Voices podcast.
But I’ve been doing what I do now since I was younger. I was always helping homeless people—raising money, volunteering at Thanksgiving, giving out food in our neighborhood. So I’ve always been involved in that way, and I also had different jobs as a teenager, especially working with Covenant House, which helps homeless youth and runaways. So I grew up kind of knowing what resources I might have if I was homeless—and then I was, for about two years and in a shelter for one.
It’s a great thing to want to help but if you don’t really understand what the journey is, you really can’t understand what a person can go through. Granted, everybody’s homeless story is different, but when you actually experience coming out of a hospital and not knowing where you can go with your new daughter, and you have nowhere to turn, it’s much different than saying, “Oh, I understand.” I really do understand, because I went through that—having a daughter be born into the world, and you feel like you have failed her already even though she just got here. I understand that pain. Those are things that I’ve actually been through. That’s why I keep doing my work.
Q: You’re a member of Aspen FSP’s Community Advisory Group (CAG). What’s that experience been like, and is there anything in particular you’re proud of that CAG has been able to accomplish?
A: The first year we didn’t know each other and were learning from each other, but the second year we built on that and started meeting in person.
And then this April we were in DC for the Financial Resilience Summit, and three of us got to talk about jobs with legislators and other people. That’s my proudest moment, to be able to go on a panel and talk about my personal experience. It’s very important that when people who are making the laws and making decisions for people that they have a person there who actually experienced it. I’m not saying a person who hasn’t lived it can’t help, but sometimes we see things a bit differently because of what we actually went through.
We know that we might not be able to get all the results we want, but we get to understand where they’re coming from, and they get to pick ideas from us. But a lot of systems are broken. We have a lot of things in place and a lot of it is just broken, and if we can help fine tune or fix what is already in place, it can make things run better.
Q: How can organizations incorporate person-centered insights into their organizations and outcomes?
A: A lot of times, organizations think that people who are less fortunate don’t have the right education—though a lot of them have associates, masters, and bachelors—but most jobs don’t need to have that though it shows up in a lot of job searches. But they really need a person of experience to be able to help with the work. Also, they need to pay livable wages, because a lot of times organizations just want to give fellowships or offer consulting jobs, and people do need full-time jobs. They need to be able to flourish and thrive.
So I think the person who is actually qualified is the one who actually went through the experience. And if they’re not all-the-way qualified, maybe start with fellowships that can help them acclimate properly to a workspace, giving them training so they can thrive in what they’re doing.
Q: So what are some of the challenges you face in this work? And what are the things that keep you going?
A: I think some challenges are probably from not getting paid enough to make sure I’m doing my best for my kid. It could be easy to fall back into where I was before.
It’s hard fighting for policy for a year and then see it fall through. That’s very disheartening, especially for things that are for kids or for families that work, when welfare isn’t enough to help them rise out of a shelter. The welfare allowance for people is not that high, and just giving a little bit more should be a no-brainer.
But when you see those kinds of things fall through, it breaks your heart just a little bit to see that the system has failed its people. But we keep trying to work with it, and when it actually happens after two or three years, you’re like, “Yes, we made it!”—and then it’s “what’s next?” because there’s always a problem happening. You’re always in the mode of trying to survive and trying to put out a fire here and a fire there, because the system seems like it is never together the way it needs to be.
Q: Is there any particular project in your time as a housing policy fellow with FHC that has really energized you, or that you found really rewarding?
A: We work with CityFHEPS—which is one of the vouchers that we have in New York City—and we wanted to get certain rules for people in shelters to be able to get it faster. Even though vouchers are not the end-all-be-all, if you get the voucher in people’s hands faster, they can hopefully move out of shelter faster. So we got an agreement to get rid of the 90-day rule that was slowing things down. But it didn’t work as we thought; the problem is more with the landlords.
You have to live and learn. The next thing we have to do is get landlords to actually take the vouchers so people can live in proper housing. So that’s our next thing— discrimination with vouchers. But we take one step at a time, and we got one barrier out of the way, and hopefully that next one can be taken away soon for families and people in New York City.
Q: You also worked on the Growing Strong cash transfer program. Can you talk about what that is and what your role is with that?
A: Oh, I love that program. I’m a person with lived experience and I was hired initially with the group HOMEworks for Zero Babies Homeless. And then they transfer over now to the Woman In Need program in New York City—the largest shelter system in New York City.
And we got a private donor to help us fund this program for parents in shelters with babies under two, and we give them monthly allowances for up to two years. The intentions are that people can use the money to pay old bills that they might have and bills in general, and also help them get down payments for apartments to move out of shelter faster and to help their family thrive and live.
A lot of people think that if you live in a shelter, then you don’t need much money because you don’t have rent. But there are other things you have to pay for. Gotta pay for food. You gotta pay for toothpaste and a toothbrush. And the kids are growing every minute so you have to pay for clothes. If you have a baby, you gotta pay for diapers. We don’t track where the money is going, we just know that they’re using it. It’s unconditional, so anything the person wants to do with it they can do with it. I’m so proud of the program and I’m so happy it can change families’ lives. It’s over a thousand dollars a month and that can really change a person’s life.
Q: Is there another organization or leader in this space that inspires you, or whose work that you want to lift up?
A: Judith Samuels is the person who’s in charge of the Growing Strong program. She’s the person who’s always backing us and finding us jobs to be able to thrive and if we need some kind of training she makes sure we get it. And she made sure that we are in the room, that it’s not just people talking about the experience but people who have lived it. She always has the backs of the people on the team—four or five of us with experience from all different backgrounds—and makes sure that our voices are lifted up.
Q: What would real wealth equality in the US look like for you, your family, and the communities you serve? And what would it take to get us there?
A: Honestly, I think it would be hard to get us there, but it can be done. Other countries have it a little bit better than we do because they think about it better than us. We would have to think about all the people, and not only think about the 1%.
When we had monthly stipends during Covid, people got out of poverty a little bit. Maybe not into the middle class, but they were able to help their children, to buy food, to pay up on rent. But we should also remember that people who are middle class are struggling. They don’t like to say they’re struggling, but it’s not only the poor; the middle class of 30 or 40 years ago is not the same as middle class now. In terms of education, if people want to go to college—which is not for everybody—there’s a barrier there, because it’s dangerous to take out loans.
And also people with mental illness, and people with drug problems. They’re part of the community, and we need to make sure that they’re okay. And then we have to pay people fairly. We want people to work all these hours but don’t pay them enough to survive. People need to have time for themselves, not work four or five jobs.
Q: What’s one thing that you would like the general public to know about the work you do?
A: That it’s not easy—and that it eventually might affect you. Homelessness can happen to anyone. You could get burned out of your house, or lose it in a storm, or have an illness or financial problems. We are all in this together.
