Highlights from the Housing Justice Team
About this blog
This is a part of an ongoing series to highlight members of the Housing Justice Team, a group of people with lived experience of housing instability or houselessness who want to change our collective housing future.
The group started without a predetermined outcome, and what emerged organically was a space where advocates across the country chose to rely on each other for support and shared-learning while dreaming up our own and our collective impact on our world. Too often, the experience of being someone with lived experience in this work can be isolating and difficult, and we sought to carve out a space where we could dream about a future where we each could grow, make change, and thrive.
Grace Lee Boggs reminds us, “We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections.”
We’ve had the opportunity to experience it together– it’s through these critical connections that we get to live into a part of justice in our time.
About Julisa Abad:
Julisa Abad is a Latina transgender woman from Florida who relocated to Michigan six years ago. Julisa is a polished, honest, and outspoken advocate for LGBTQ equality, as well as issues that face the transgender community including housing, education, victim's assistance, health care, and violence reduction. She is fluent in three languages including Spanish and Portuguese. Julisa knows that advocacy, outreach, and education are the foundation for a stronger, safer, and more vibrant transgender community. She is a much sought after spokeswoman, trainer, and advisor in metro Detroit and throughout the state. She has provided information and training on LGBTQ issues at the Michigan Alliance Against Hate conference, to the Southeastern Michigan HIV/AIDS Awareness Council, the Neighborhood Police Officer Summit Empowerment Forum, the Ruth Ellis Center, h.e.l.p. Detroit, and the Detroit City Council to name a few. She helped Southeastern Michigan HIV/AIDS Awareness Council prepare a healthcare intake process for transgender individuals, and advised both the Detroit Police Department and the United States Army on building trust and otherwise interacting with transgender individuals. She worked to provide emergency housing, furnishings, and healthcare, helped the Justice Project aid crime victims and find and interview crime witnesses, helped transgender persons to get IDs with the correct gender, and provided numerous interviews and responses to current events to the news media. She has done all of this within the last six months - she is truly a remarkable woman!
Hear about Julisa’s project and reflections on being a part of the Housing Justice Team:
I wanted to host a conversation on the importance of transgender individuals having access to gender affirming identification and how that impacts their ability to be able to have resources such as housing, education, employment, and medical services. Check out my conversation with the rest of the Housing Justice Team here!
What brought me into housing advocacy? My personal lived experience navigating shelters. I was interested in joining this group to make a difference for the LGBTQ community specifically for trans women of color. The part of this group that has impacted me is the connections and expansion I’ve been able to make, to make a difference here where I live in Detroit. I share power by understanding the privilege I do have, having a lighter complexion and using my privilege to bring in others that might not have a voice and vice versa when an ally understands their privilege and shares their power with me so that I can do the work I do. What power means to me is being heard and being able to make a change. It shows up in my work in multiple ways: voting people in elected seats with the views that align with ours to continue to be able to do this advocacy and change policies.