No Hard Hats Needed! Affordable housing advocates are vital

We often think of Habitat volunteers as the people out on site, building houses while wearing a hard hat and carrying a hammer. While our construction volunteers are vital, advocacy has its own branch of volunteers known as Legislative Ambassadors. Our Legislative Ambassadors are a key part of the advocacy work we do here at Habitat. In the Twin Cities metro area, there are seven counties and about 70 legislative districts that we focus on. We work to recruit Ambassadors in all of those legislative districts to make sure our impact is at its maximum.

Ambassadors are important because they are one of our first points of contact and provide an extra set of eyes and ears. The legislative session is a very busy time for housing advocates, between individual legislator meetings, floor sessions, committee meetings and more. When we need extra information about what is happening with housing in a district, we can rely on our ambassadors to provide it. Sometimes there are multiple committees that may meet at the same time and instead of choosing, we can have them all covered by dividing the work between our ambassadors.

Most importantly, ambassadors are constituents and that is who legislators want to hear from the most. This means ambassadors participate in our Tuesday Action Alerts and write letters to their legislators; but also take their advocacy a step further. They meet with their legislators one-on-one and may attend town hall meetings  to discuss why they care about housing. This constant presence and contact allows a good ambassador-legislator relationship to develop and means legislators know Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity is a reliable source for housing information.

Legislative ambassadors are involved in so much more, too! If you are interested in becoming a legislative ambassador or know someone who may like to be, you can find more information here or email us at advocate@tchabitat.org. Training is provided.