Reflections on 20 Years

An Interview with Jubilee Housing President & CEO Jim Knight

by Amanda Long

A skeptic. A wounded man whose dream of playing professional baseball had just been dashed and whose mother had just died far too young. A wanderer, searching for a path his faith was pushing him to find, but not sure what that looked like or where it led. A college baseball coach with zero experience in affordable housing. That’s how Jim Knight described himself when he first came to Jubilee Housing in 1994 as an intern, as part of the Discipleship Year program with The Church of the Saviour.

One year and countless toilets unclogged later, Jim was no longer a skeptic. He’d seen the work firsthand that Jubilee Housing and other Church of the Saviour missions were doing in Washington, DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood. Just walking down the block, the evidence of faith-based service was impossible to miss. And Jim’s immersion into the Jubilee community was healing. Sitting down to a meal with Queen Esther and other memorable residents, sharing a house with six other disciples, attending Servant Leadership School classes, attending worship led by Gordon Cosby, and seeing the reality of affordable housing in a thriving, healthy neighborhood changed him. “I knew I wanted to be a part of this for the rest of my life,” Jim says.

The path back to Jubilee after the internship would be full of twists and detours. Jim’s then-girlfriend and now-wife Wendy was still finishing veterinary school in Tennessee. When she finished and got a vet job in McLean, Virginia, the couple returned to DC. However, Jim’s mentor and Jubilee’s founder, Bill Branner, was no longer at the helm, and no jobs were in the offing. Jim took a program leadership position at Samaritan Inns, Church of the Saviour’s addictions recovery and transitional housing program, a formative experience at what he considers “the best run nonprofit” at the intersection of faith and business. “It was hugely important for me to see that it is possible,” he says of a fiscally and spiritually solvent business model. “It can be real.”

Things got even more real in 2002, when Jim became executive director at Jubilee Housing. It was a leap of faith, fueled by trust. Jim is adamant about giving credit to those who created the community he was about to lead. “I trusted the people who held the positions before me. I trusted that the work is being carried from beyond us and that it would continue to be,” he says, determined to put their legacy ahead of any talk of his 20 years at the helm. “[They] had created an unusual, but amazingly impactful church and tilled the soil for all these missions. People who laid down their lives for this — we stand on their shoulders.”

From that grounding, Jim is leading Jubilee Housing into its Jubilee year — one ripe with opportunity for transformation. On the heels of the country’s racial reckoning, in the heart of the nation’s capital, at a time when the economic and racial chasms between us threaten to tear our social fabric apart, Jubilee has “a chance to reimagine what it means to be Jubilee,” Jim says. “In ancient scripture, the Jubilee year was an antidote to structural problems. Debts were released. Prisoners set free,” he says. “It’s time for Jubilee to do its share of dismantling inequitable structures, internally and externally.”

In a recent interview exploring Jim’s two decades as executive director and even longer history with Jubilee, Jim shared how coming to Jubilee has changed him — and how Jubilee has changed with him at the helm:

You started out pursuing a career in baseball. Sports can be a religion for many — how did your faith and passion for baseball compete for your attention and time?

Baseball had been my faith. It was my single laser focus. I grew up in a family where faith was important, so I’ve had the orientation in me the whole time. But faith wasn’t really manifesting as a priority.

When I finished four years of college, I assumed I would be drafted [by a professional baseball team]. It didn’t happen. I came back to my hometown to finish my degree, pretty disillusioned and embittered. Then I got this chance to try out at pro camps. I remember myself doing that private bargaining with God, saying, “If you give me just this taste, when it’s over, I’m yours.”

I got the taste, but that’s all it was. I was cut after spring training. After that, I became a college baseball coach, and started going to the Presbyterian Church in my hometown. It was really lighting a fire in me. But the life of a coach is crowded. It’s a hamster wheel. It couldn’t hold enough space for my faith. The pit was in my stomach; I knew I’d have to quit coaching. I asked my mentor at the church, “Maybe I should go to seminary?” He said, “Sure, you can do that, but first I want you to go the Church of the Saviour in DC for its discipleship year.”

You describe yourself as skeptical of mainstream religion. Were you convinced this was the right move?

A lot about mainstream religions isn’t working, and it’s certainly not working for me. So, yes, I’m pretty skeptical. In much of my experience of church, you have to divorce reasoning from the process. But not here. Here was this group, doing the work. You’d walk down the block — I still do this now — and everywhere you point, there’s a mission that grew out of the church. These people weren’t talking about some by and by — they were doing it now. I immediately wanted to be a part of it.

What was that year like for Jim the intern/disciple?

It could have been a cartoon: This young, dumb jock from North Carolina rolls into Adams Morgan and starts knocking on doors asking how he can help. Living in that group house, taking classes in servant leadership, worshiping at Church of the Saviour with Gordon Cosby. It was a powerful confluence of influence. It caught me. It was real.

I was a gopher. I did what nobody else wanted to do, whether that was clearing a clogged toilet or following pest control around. I was in charge of pest control. I knocked on the doors of 200 households, just asking, “Can I help you take care of this or that?”

Anywhere you start your faith journey, wounds are being healed. I carried a lot of wounds into that year — losing my mother, losing the dream of playing baseball on television. A lot of me was beat up. But sitting down to eat with Queen Esther, breaking bread together, eating foods I’d never eaten, being accepted just the way I am, that was healing. All of it was healing.

When you came on board, what was your first priority?

The first thing I wanted to do was go and see those families who had fed me those years before, and I wanted to ask them: “What do you want? What do want from Jubilee? We’ve got all kinds of ways to connect you to homeownership, job training, education.”

Everyone says, “Fix my pipes. I’m tired of the ceiling leaking.”

So began my straight-up learning curve of finance and development of affordable housing. I had all the ideas and plans — to jump-start the transformative quality of supporting people along their goals. But that was met with, “Maybe you don’t understand how important this housing piece is. I can’t follow my dreams when I’m cleaning my floors from leaky pipes.” I had to jump-start the physical transformation of our buildings before anything. We had nine 90-year-old buildings that hadn’t seen a significant renovation in 30 years. The conditions were affordable, but they weren’t high-quality anymore. I did say to the board, “If we don’t take this seriously, I’m not the right guy.” There wasn’t any pushback from that, but there wasn’t anyone who was ready to take on the job before.

How did you find capital for the renovations?

That’s when I got my education in acronyms. You have to know what LIHTC is, what HPTF is, and what LRSP is. Those are glorious letters that go with all the federal and city dollars that are needed to make this work.

I had pretty close to zero background in politics. I had voted before. Luckily, the Church of the Saviour community has international reach. People visited from all over the world to learn from us. One of those visitors was Gordon Blackwell, an affordable housing developer. Gordon connected us to a developer named Juanita (Wadell) Priddy. She showed us everything in DC from A to Z. She introduced us to the various agencies, prepared us for our funding applications, showed us how to hire architects. There would be no Jubilee Housing without her.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given?

I asked my mentor at Samaritan Inns this very question when I left to go to Jubilee. He said: “Take a reasonable amount of time to assess, but then find one important thing to do.” Make sure that change is noticeable. We created a homeownership prep program. We set aside a number of apartments for this homeownership track, and 25 families went on to buy their own home in three years.

Which piece of advice are you immensely glad you didn’t take?

Just about everybody tells us at some point that we should sell the properties and go somewhere else. But that misses the point that everyone deserves access to the kinds of resources and opportunities that come in neighborhoods like Adams Morgan.

What about your personality do you have to continue to develop to more effectively get the job done?

Everything. The do-er in me likes to do. But leaders don’t always need to do. They need to support the gifts and doing of others. That’s a growing edge. The gift of being willing to take risks must be offset with discipline and stewardship.

Tell us about a time when someone (or many people) told you something could not be done, but you (and others) did it anyway.

Which time? Really, there have been many times, but this is where I want to highlight our journey into housing people who transition out of incarceration. In 2008, Gordon Cosby started gathering a bunch of us from different missions, telling we needed to listen to Janelle Goetcheus, who at the time led health care at the DC jail for Unity Health Care. He wanted us to hear her describe what she’s seeing at the jail. He said, “You’re going to get the urge to do something. You can’t. You have to listen.”

Try telling that to a chronic, addicted do-er. That’s telling someone who’s hungry not to eat. I knew the minute I was in the first meeting we had to do something about housing. But first I had to listen. What I heard was emblematic of the dehumanization of millions of people.

And then not long after that, there I am journaling at Tryst, gazing across the street when I see this boarded-up building. How is there a boarded-up building left in Adams Morgan?! The building is up for auction — that Friday. We needed $65,000 to bid. We had church on Thursday night. I go, tell them about the building and by the time I left that small group of 20 people, we had the money. Like so many Jubilee journeys, it’s not a straight line. But now we’ve redeveloped that building with the help of the city for transitional housing for people coming out of incarceration. In 10 years, 300 people have come through. It wasn’t that someone said “you can’t do it”; they said “you can’t do it — yet.”

You’ve been described as a risk-taker. Where does that gumption come from?

If humans don’t learn how to take more risks, life will not be better for more humans. You have to do it.

What’s the first thing you tell people about Jubilee?

We’re in the people business, and we do it through housing.

If you could gather all the citizens of DC and tell them about reentry housing in the city, what would you say?

We have a genuine chance to make our world better. We can, right now, begin to right the decades of wrong together. Each safe pathway home is liberation for one more person. If we do that long enough, we can learn how to not send anyone away in the first place.

What would 2022 Jim tell 2002 Jim?

I did not recognize early enough the importance and gifts of other people. I like doing. I was really happy to have a platform from which to do more. That [approach] can be about yourself if you’re not careful. It doesn’t sustain operations for the long haul. You have to be able to surround yourself with good people who you can rely on — and then trust them to do the work once you hand it off to them. It’s the trusting part you have to get good at. It’s hard for me to not take it back and do it myself. You need other people. We can only do this together, not alone.

In celebration of Jim Knight’s 20th year leading Jubilee Housing, we invited several of Jim’s colleagues and friends to share reflections on meaningful moments.