Activating Change Together
By Junia Howell | February 3, 2026
3 minute read
As a U.S. citizen, 2025 felt like drinking from a firehose of tragic headlines: devastating wildfires, violent conflicts, immigration raids, tariff wars, and inflating costs. As a nonprofit leader, 2025 felt like double Dutching ropes of political announcements—constantly jumping over one tumultuous executive order after another.
I knew 2026 wasn’t poised to be dramatically better. And, sadly, the first four weeks of 2026 have shown national tragedies continue—even getting worse. Yet, I was excited for 2026 because I had clarity for how eruka could actively be a part of making positive change happen in this calendar year.
Launching In Communities
For the last few years, eruka has been refining our understanding of how alternative housing and finance services can be used to build a just economy, one where every being is respected and cherished.
Central to our approach is working alongside local leaders to ensure our alternative services are tailored to meet the needs of each community. Towards this end, we will first bring together activists, advocates, artists, academics and anyone who is interested to learn, cocreate, and enact new services. We are calling this initiative Activating Change Together, or ACT.
The ACT Initiative
ACT will unfold in three phases. The first phase will entail a six-week learning circle. The circle is intended to educate participants on how federal policies, local governmental budgets, and personal decisions contribute to the housing market’s failures. Each week, participants will complete a lesson on their own time that illuminates national trends and their impact on the participant’s own community. The participants will then come together for a facilitated weekly discussion.
The second phase is the creation of a local roadmap. Building upon the insights of the learning circle, a cohort of community leaders will derive a plan for how interventions could be implemented within their communities. These roadmaps will highlight the community’s most pressing issues, legal constraints and opportunities, and potential organizational partners. The plans will sketch out a list of priorities and strategies for affecting change within the local context.
ACT’s third phase will include launching new services within the community. Following the outlined roadmap, eruka, alongside local partners, will launch public awareness events, art installations, research reports, new services and/or local ballot initiatives aimed at transforming the housing market’s unjust logics and processes.
Getting Involved
Plans are still taking shape, but we hope to launch the ACT in Baltimore, Boston, and Pittsburgh this spring. If you live in one of these cities and want to know the latest about events happening in your city, please sign up here.
Can’t wait to get involved? In preparation for launching, we are hosting a virtual learning circle for participants nationwide. This pilot learning circle is designed to help us refine our new curriculum and prepare leaders in various cities to help co-lead the ACT within their communities. If you are interested in joining, check out this flyer and register at this link.
Want to bring housing reform to your city? If you are interested in bringing the ACT to your city, let us know. We are still looking for additional partners.
Leaning Into Hope
We can’t tell the future. We don’t know what this year or this initiative will bring. Yet, we are excited to be leaning into this year with hope. Hope that we can come together. Hope that we can build a just world. Hope that each of us can truly thrive. We look forward to telling you how our efforts are continuing to make our hope a reality.
