Fundraising Toolkit for Local Housing Non-Profits

As a housing non-profit you likely have a mission to both create new affordable housing options and preserve and maintain the ones you have already created. Foundational to this work is a healthy, functioning organization- with an annual budget, bookkeeping activities, Directors and Officers insurance, annual tax filings, among many other operational activities. All of this, as you well know, costs money on top of your project specific expenses. This toolkit is intended to help you identify funding sources and strategies to meet your specific funding needs. For the purposes of this toolkit we’ve separated out two types of funding needs:

1. Project-Related Funding Needs

This includes pre-development, acquisition, infrastructure, and construction/renovation funding for new projects as well as maintenance needs or renovation cots on existing projects that are not covered by rental income or capital reserves.

2. Operations and Other Local Funding Needs

This includes things like bookkeeping, insurance, tax prep, communications (newsletters, website, etc.), and fundraising tools/platforms. There will also always be some portion of project related costs that have to be raised locally to show local support for the project.

Much of this toolkit provides a menu of options for meeting these funding needs.