Roles and Goals in the Affordable Housing System
How Shared Work Can Build Shared Systems
Support from The Connecticut Project enabled CTData to offer Data Strategic Planning to a cohort of organizations working to increase access to affordable housing across the state. This cohort brings together nonprofit housing developers, advocates, financers, organizers, and planners operating at the local, regional, and statewide levels. Although these organizations share common goals, work and outcomes, they are not formally connected as a system.
CTData began by providing each organization with data literacy workshops and individualized coaching to advance their own internal data work. From there, we moved the cohort into shared spaces, facilitating workshops that focused on the bigger picture: the affordable housing system as a whole.
In these sessions, we discussed the overlapping goals, distinct roles, and persistent challenges that shape Connecticut’s housing landscape. Together, participants mapped out the different functions their organizations perform—such as developing and preserving affordable housing, advocating for policy change, educating the public, researching housing needs, financing development, and promoting neighborhood stability. Through this shared dialogue, the group was able to see both the strengths and the blind spots in their collective efforts.
We also explored how each organization’s work contributes to system-wide goals, which helped surface where activities overlap, where gaps exist, and where barriers might be slowing progress. This kind of shared analysis is a powerful step toward formalizing a system that has long depended on informal connections and collaborations.
At our next cohort workshop, CTData will facilitate the development of a simplified logic model for the affordable housing system in Connecticut. This tool will help the cohort articulate common goals, shared activities, and meaningful ways to measure progress—laying the groundwork for stronger collaboration moving forward.
When organizations doing interconnected work take the time to align their roles and goals, they begin to build the connective tissue of a formal system—even if that system wasn’t designed to be one. Shared work can turn informal networks into intentional collaborations.
By making these roles visible and these goals explicit, we are helping to create something more durable and coordinated. Shared work doesn’t just advance individual missions—it can formalize and strengthen the systems that sustain long-term change.
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