The backend of a housing movement

Nine housing justice organizations, one statewide bond campaign, and a shared data agreement that let them act as a single coalition without any of them surrendering control of their own numbers.

Molly Marsh, Ja'Nai Aubry, Azul Cortez, Amie Fishman and Yesenia Jameson at the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California — From left: Molly Marsh, senior executive operations manager at NPH; Ja’Nai Aubry, associate director for public interest and public sector programs at UC Berkeley Law; me, then senior project manager at NPH; Amie Fishman, NPH’s executive director; and Yesenia Jameson, senior content manager.

organizations under one data-sharing agreement

$20B

California housing bond campaign launched

organizations reached by the pilot program

200+

professionals engaged

Organizations Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, and the nine-organization coalition around it

My role Senior Project Manager, Campaigns and Community Engagement

Dates May 2020 to June 2022

Scope CRM implementation, data strategy, voter targeting, infrastructure design, cross-organization coordination

🧭 Where this sits. Civic infrastructure, and the first governance architecture I ever built. Getting nine independent organizations to agree on shared metrics and who may see what is the same problem I later studied across three national jurisdictions in a port corridor. Different scale, identical question: what has to be formalized before separate parties can act as one.

🧩 Context and challenge

Movements run on energy. They scale on systems.

Passing a housing bond, coordinating across jurisdictions, running a statewide voter engagement program: each needs more than commitment. It needs infrastructure that connects what a coalition intends to what its organizers can actually execute on a Tuesday.

The hard part was never the software. Nine organizations each had their own definitions, their own tracking habits, and legitimate reasons to be careful about what they shared. Any system that ignored that would be abandoned within a month.

🤝 At NPH

A nine-organization data-sharing agreement

📜

Wrote the agreement itself

Led creation of a regional data-sharing agreement across nine housing justice organizations, which meant negotiating what each would contribute and what stayed theirs.

📐

Established shared metrics

Agreed common definitions for displacement, local ordinances, zoning campaigns, and field activity, so nine datasets could finally be added together.

🗣

Facilitated the alignment

Ran the alignment calls and wrote the standard operating procedures that turned nine sets of habits into one workflow, then trained people on it.

🎯

Kept the tech subordinate to strategy

Mapped backend infrastructure directly to advocacy goals, so the system served the campaign rather than the campaign reshaping itself around the software.

🧰 Tools and strategies

EveryActionContact management, segmentation, impact tracking

PDIVoter file targeting, turnout modeling, field turf development

Airtable and Google WorkspaceWorkflow documentation and coalition-wide tracking

Tableau, Sheets, CanvaOutreach dashboards and narrative visualization

Data-sharing agreementsThe legal and equity scaffolding under coalition coordination

Facilitation and SOP designCross-organization alignment, training, and collective memory

📈 Outcomes

Nine-organization agreement signedShared tracking of policy wins and displacement patterns across a region that had never pooled data before

$20B bond campaign launchedA pilot program reaching 200+ professionals across 30 organizations

Duplicative outreach cutField and digital teams stopped contacting the same households across jurisdictional lines

CRM and PDI integratedOrganizers could retarget mid-campaign instead of waiting for the next cycle

The blueprint outlived the campaignBackend patterns documented and reusable by the next coalition

The backend is not separate from the work. It is the work.

CRMs, voter files, data agreements, dashboards: these decide who gets reached, what counts as progress, and whether a coalition can still coordinate in year three. Building them with the coalition’s values written into the structure produced more than efficiency. It produced the conditions under which nine organizations could hold power together.