Tenant Power Is a Strategy: Convening Housing Justice Organizers and Funders
Cypress envisions a just Carolinas shaped by the leadership of Black, Indigenous, working-class, and migrant communities. This vision hinges on our principled commitment to resourcing housing and land justice organizers who are reclaiming land, resisting displacement, organizing tenants, and building grassroots power to make that vision real.
In our April blog, Haints That Root Us: Why We Invest in Black Housing Justice, we shared the historical and ecological context that shows the Carolinas to be a critical geography ripe for honest narrative-building around housing and land, tenant-led organizing, and land repatriation to Black and Indigenous folks. Across the Carolinas, these communities are navigating a landscape of compounding threats: climate catastrophe, disaster capitalism, corporate-led gentrification, agribusiness expansion, extractive tourism, and university-driven “innovation zones” that displace the very communities they claim to uplift.
To continue in that knowledge, Cypress hosted a Tenant Power Happy Hour during the 2025 Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) Learning Conference in Charlotte. GEO’s Learning Conference was centered around learning and evaluation best practices for community-centered, equity-driven grantmaking. In this atmosphere of transformative learning for grantmakers, our team planned Tenant Power Happy Hour as a moment where our communities could gather, comfortably and casually, and where donors and funders could heed the wisdom of local housing justice organizers and organizations. It was a moment for funders to pause, listen, and learn directly from housing justice organizers leading transformative work across North Carolina.
💥 Meet the Organizers Leading the Way
At the event, we proudly spotlighted four of our grantee partners — each rooted in powerful, place-based housing justice work:
- Charlotte Housing Justice Coalition defends tenants from evictions and organizes for long-term, structural housing solutions in one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the state.
- North Carolina Tenants Union (NCTU) is building tenant power across public housing, mobile home parks, and unregulated private buildings — organizing a base of overwhelmingly Black, brown, and low-income residents.
- Poder EMMA is fighting for housing justice in mobile home parks in and around the Emma community, where residents face mounting displacement pressures.
- SEAC Village is organizing Southeast Asian and Black communities across multiple counties through a model grounded in healing, cultural preservation, and mutual aid.
Our grantee partners brought wisdom, policy vision, lived experience, and joy into the room. They are experts who are often denied that title by policymakers and funders alike. Our job is to heed their wisdom and move money with care and strategically.
🏡NCTU in Action
- In Western North Carolina, tenants successfully fought against decisions made by Asheville’s Housing Authority to prioritize rent over tenant well-being post-Hurricane Helene.
- Tenants in Winston-Salem prevented the displacement of more than 200 of their neighbors by stopping the sale of Crystal Towers. Members secured the first tenant-run co-op in the city and secured meaningful repairs for hundreds of neighbors.
- In Raleigh, tenants stopped a rent increase from $800 to $1150, securing a rent freeze.
NCTU is strategically positioned to expand its impact through two priority campaigns: one to democratize public housing authorities through tenant-elected boards, and another to establish municipal emergency repair programs that ensure dignity, safety, and speed in responding to housing crises.
🌱 What We’re Building
Our Tenant Power Happy Hour was more than a social event — it was a political intervention. It’s part of our broader housing justice strategy to:
- Center tenant-led movement organizers as experts and strategists,
- Deepen our shared understanding of the Carolinas’ housing histories and futures,
- And shift how donors think about power, risk, and responsibility.
At Cypress, we operate as movement accomplices and conveners. We organize wealth toward the communities most impacted by extraction, exploitation, and land theft. And we use our access to power, resources, and relationships to create secure spaces where donors can build real trust with frontline organizers.
Tenant Power Happy Hour is one of many transformative experiences we offer to donors who are reorganizing and strengthening their funding across ecosystems and groups. It’s what transformative donor organizing looks like: not just writing checks, but being in the work — learning, unlearning, and investing for the liberated South our grantees are already imagining and building. It is also the beginning of our longterm housing interventions that are dedicated to building honest knowledge, storytelling, attention, and funding around housing in the Carolinas as we resource our grantee partners with key movement and donor connections, and provide transformative learning experiences for donors.
To learn more about what Cypress and our grantee partners are doing, subscribe to our newsletter on our new website. If you want to resource housing organizers in any amount, please donate here or email us at info@cypressfund.org.
