Local volunteers needed to train for housing program

MILLERTON — With the first Housing Ambassador Training Program (HATP) session coming up this week, the Millerton-North East working group of the Tri-Town Coalition (TTC) launched a discussion on how the group can gather a more robust community representation to participate in the program sessions at its group meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 12.

As was discussed at its previous meeting on Sept. 14, the HATP is funded by the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation through Hudson River Housing and focuses on advocating for affordable housing. The program will include three virtual training sessions with one training session a month.

The first will be held on Thursday, Oct. 28, and will focus on the vocabulary or how community members define affordable housing.

Though the dates for the next two sessions have yet to be finalized at this time, the second training will focus on data (or how communities benefit from affordable housing) and the third training will focus on tools (or what communities can do to solve the housing crisis).

Initiating the discussion about the program, Sam Busselle, a working group member, encouraged everyone to find more folks who represent different groups to join in order to get a more robust representation of all the communities in the tri-town region (North East/Millerton, Amenia and Pine Plains).

He said he’s talked with Nathan Briggs about how many people they can get from different jobs and backgrounds, and how many people they can solicit from each of the three towns. Busselle then turned the discussion over to Briggs, who outlined the structure of the three sessions.

Briggs explained the program wants to train participants in the literacy surrounding affordable housing “and then how to take that literacy and use it.” He said ambassadors will be trained to take what’s often considered a “contentious topic and craft it in a way that it becomes less contentious and more productive.”

In terms of advocacy, Busselle said advocating for affordable housing isn’t going to happen without people “representing the needs of the individuals sectors of the community. It’s very exciting to think we could get a substantial number of advocates and ambassadors to talk it up in their own circles.”

Moving forward with encouraging more people to join the program, Busselle, Briggs and the rest of the working group spoke of the voices missing from the housing conversation and how they could go about collecting those voices so they have an opportunity to tell their stories.