The North Carolina Housing Finance Agency is a self-supporting public agency that provides safe, affordable housing opportunities to enhance the quality of life of North Carolinians. Since its creation by the General Assembly, the Agency has financed more than 321,320 affordable homes and apartments, totaling $34.4 billion.

The Agency provides financing through the sale of tax-exempt bonds and management of federal tax credit programs, the federal HOME Program, the state and national Housing Trust Funds, and other programs.

Partners for Impact provided SHARP Outreach and Technical Assistance.

What is the problem we are trying to solve?

The Supportive Housing American Rescue Plan (SHARP) Program, managed through the NC Housing Finance Agency (NCHFA) was structured to support development of affordable housing across North Carolina for individuals and families experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness. In an effort to reach rural communities that often are underrepresented in federal funding programs for affordable housing, NCHFA contracted with Partners for Impact to provide Outreach and Technical Assistance for 19 rural counties in the middle and eastern parts of the state.  

Our Process: 

Our team of consultants conducted extensive outreach through direct messaging, phone calls and networking in each community, to share the SHARP opportunity with local governments, nonprofits, housing developers, faith communities and community advocates. As communities showed interest, our team provided technical assistance for them to understand specific federal and NCHFA application and project requirements, assess the scope of their affordable housing project, develop an appropriate and adequate team for housing development and for programming, consider sustainability for the life of the project, connect with housing consultants and explore land options.

The end result and continued success:

Nine counties expressed interest and explored possible projects resulting in five applications for SHARP funding. Several entities that ultimately did not apply expressed appreciation for the outreach and technical assistance process and said they felt more prepared for future federal affordable housing applications.

Our team learned so much from this project that we decided to collect our learnings along with a little more targeted research through a couple of focus groups with rural county leaders. The results will be published in a White Paper on The Challenges of Rural NC Affordable Housing.