Asking tough questions, rooted in equity
Thrive Asheville brings local residents together to solve local challenges. We believe that we can be better if we work together better. We use research, education, and advocacy to connect community leaders to ideas and solutions for a sustainable, affordable, and inclusive Asheville.
We use an equity lens to examine every issue in front of us. That means we purposely look at race, ethnicity, gender, and other factors that have marginalized groups in every solution on the table and every proposed metric of success.
We must ask and answer together questions like: How can our civic institutions work so that all of us can flourish? What would it mean for Asheville if we invested in building relationships in infrastructure that makes everyone's life better? Are we thinking big enough to demonstrate the potential for meaningful change?
NEW! Landlord-Tenant Partnership
Right now, countless individuals and families in Asheville lack stable, safe, or affordable housing. Yet, it’s also true that many of these folks have a solution that could help them find housing through housing choice vouchers—guaranteed financial assistance to move themselves and their families into rentals on the private market. But, for a variety of reasons, tenants often cannot find landlords to take the vouchers, meaning they are unable to move into the property of their choice.
Thrive Asheville is helping change that. Through the Landlord-Tenant Partnership, we bring together landlords, tenants, nonprofits, and housing specialists to facilitate a partnership between landlords and tenants who have housing choice vouchers. We help landlords understand and navigate the process of accepting vouchers, and we collaborate with partner organizations to surface and support tenants’ needs when it comes to finding housing.
Because this process is likely new to both landlords and tenants, we engage them with culturally competent training and resources, which builds an ecosystem of partnership and one that is more likely to succeed.