Welcome to a new year, a new decade, and a new opportunity to work together to fashion a more just and inclusive city. In this newsletter, we celebrate the end of 2019 and the work ahead in 2020.

As the year closed, volunteers and supporters helped us offer some extra joy for the holiday season: more than 80 young Jubilee residents purchased holiday gifts for their families from the much-discounted Elf Store and 70 Jubilee families received gifts from their holiday Wish List. In addition, a team of dedicated and determined employees from WashREIT raised money and donated time to renovate Jubilee’s Youth Services centers, playground, and outdoor community space. Now, cohort after cohort of young people will experience this new beauty in their environment, spurring their appreciation of the beauty that is also in them.

One of the privileges for Jubilee is to be able to convene efforts such as these that offer support but, as importantly, foster relationship-building and community. A key draw for participants is to experience the giving together. We’re all better and more alive when we are using our energy to give.

The gift of giving extends far beyond the physical results. Giving is about the reciprocity of making connections with others and seeing ourselves in each other.  

Such connections catapulted our Justice Housing Partners Fund (the Fund) from vision to $5.3 million in a little more than a year, positioning Jubilee to take advantage of two additional opportunities for development in 2019. Those efforts will make possible 74 more justice housing units over the next few years.

When you’re given a vision of something that needs to be and that’s beyond your capacity, it sometimes resonates with others and evokes the energy and investment that makes possible achievements previously considered incomprehensible.

Jubilee’s vision wasn’t simply to create an investment fund and buy four properties. The vision was to meet more of the desperate need in our city for deeply affordable housing, especially for those facing the greatest challenges – including men and women returning from incarceration. Consequently, people were drawn to invest in the Fund, support the plan, and take us where we couldn’t have gone otherwise. Investors saw the need in others and wanted to be part of a solution.

We closed the fund at the end of 2019 with the purchase of the King Emmanuel Baptist Church. This newest property will provide additional space for programs and homes specifically for women and men returning from incarceration. So, we entered 2020 able to expand our successful, 11-year-old Reentry Program to more individuals like Louis Sawyer, whose lived experience and resulting wisdom we honor in this newsletter.  

We recognize the many individuals who make our work possible. We are thankful for your continued support.

We are readying ourselves for the next season, during which we will continue to challenge the pain, brokenness, and “not yet” experience felt in communities across D.C.

We hope you and others will join  us in this work – to understand the persistent inequities, to recognize ways to improve the circumstances, and to become part of the solution. As we saw with the Fund, the holiday giving, and the renovations created by the volunteers from WashREIT, the experience of responding to injustice  together is transformative.

Therefore, we are working not only to deliver much-needed services, but also to do so in community with one another.

Whether you participate with Jubilee as an investor, as a resident, as a volunteer, or in any role in between, you will find that we are about connecting lives together for the common good. When we succeed, we all receive much more than we give.

We value your support and hope you’ll find more ways to engage with Jubilee Housing in 2020!