In 2014, Becca Davis, founder of the Coalition for Home Repair and its ReFrame conference, called me looking for speaker recommendations. That conversation led to my first time speaking at ReFrame. It also began one of the most meaningful relationships in KFA's work.
On October 5 and 6, I'll be back at ReFrame in Atlanta. This year's conference looks like the Coalition's most ambitious yet, and if you work in home repair, I hope you'll join me.
What's new this year: the Home Repair Solutions Lab
ReFrame 2026 opens on Monday, October 5, with something different. The Home Repair Solutions Lab is a full-day working session where practitioners, funders, policymakers, and researchers tackle the field's hardest problems together. It builds on the Coalition's 2024 Solutions Lab in Detroit.
The day has three panels, and each is followed by small-group sessions where attendees work on a specific question:
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Collaboration and Coordination: how nonprofits, local governments, funders, and health and human service providers can build a stronger home repair ecosystem.
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Barriers to Access: how heirs' property and tangled titles keep homeowners from repair assistance, and what legal and policy approaches are working.
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Capacity Challenges: how organizations can meet growing need while managing staffing, contractor shortages, compliance, and funding pressure.
At lunch, Metro Atlanta homeowners will talk about their own experiences with home repair. That keeps the whole day grounded in the people this work is for.
Day two: plenaries and practical breakouts
Tuesday, October 6, brings the familiar ReFrame format of plenaries and breakouts. The morning plenary looks at federal solutions to the national home repair crisis. The afternoon plenary takes on what it calls "the other housing crisis": the deterioration and loss of affordable homes that already exist.
The breakouts run across three tracks: Construction & Maintenance, Services & Organizational Development, and Advocacy & Resources. Topics range from ventilation and crawlspace assessments to disaster recovery, contractor capacity, and coordinating fragmented funding.
My session, "Real Intelligence + Artificial Intelligence = Nonprofit Success," is in the first breakout block on the Advocacy & Resources track. My attendees will come away with practical, ethical ways of using AI to lighten their administrative load without producing enough slop to feed a large hog farm.
Twelve years of working alongside this community
For most of our relationship, KFA worked with individual Coalition members, home repair organizations from Sacramento, California, to Wilmington, North Carolina. Each shared the same mission, but each needed a funding path built around its own work, geography, and capacity.
In 2021, we worked directly with the Coalition to secure its first $1 million grant, through HUD's Veteran Housing Rehabilitation and Modification Pilot Program. That award let us bring what we had learned from individual members to the Coalition's entire national membership. Becca put it this way:
"Ginger helped our nonprofit receive our first ever one million dollar federal grant but also she taught us the skills so that we can continue to apply for grants on our own and we'll be able to get multiple times that amount of funding in the future."
That is still the outcome I care about most.
What this community has taught me
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Relationships come before applications. Our best results grew from years of knowing the people doing the work. ReFrame is where many of those relationships start.
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Fit matters more than size. A grant labeled "housing" may not fund repairs, your service area, or your stage of readiness. Start with the real work and its real costs.
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Build capacity, not dependence. The goal is a team that is stronger at funding its own work.
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Together, we reach further. A national coalition can pursue funding no single member could, and that funding flows back to local work.
Join us in Atlanta
ReFrame 2026 is October 5–6 at the Renaissance Atlanta Midtown Hotel. Registration options include a full conference ticket and a Solutions Lab day pass for October 5 only. There is no virtual option this year.
If you'll be there, come to my session or find me between sessions. I'd love to hear what your organization is building and which funding decision is on your mind. If you can't make it, reach out anyway. That conversation is where KFA's Grant Prospectus begins.