Reclaiming Our Cities: Fighting Displacement and Building Belonging

Community Over Chaos Speaker Series: Part of the 250 Conversations on America Series in collaboration with Dialogue Vanderbilt.

Join us for an inspiring conversation with Tara Raghuveer, a national leader in the housing justice movement and Director of Tenant Union Federation. We will explore how everyday people are fighting displacement and building real belonging. Together, we’ll examine the root causes of the housing crisis, hear stories from the frontlines of tenant organizing, and discuss bold strategies to reclaim our communities for the people who live in them.

Tara Raghuveer is the director of the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), a national union of unions organizing tenants to wield power at a massive scale. Previously Tara was the director of Homes Guarantee campaign. In these roles, she has trained thousands of tenants, organized campaigns to win federal tenant protections through the White House, Treasury Department, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. She is a frequent writer and commentator on housing policy and the economy.

Tara is also the founding director of KC Tenants, the 10,000+ member citywide tenant union in Kansas City, MO, responsible for the city's Tenants Bill of Rights (2019), Right to Counsel (2021), Source of Income Discrimination Ban (2024), and an Office of Language Access (2024). The union organized to stop thousands of pandemic evictions through escalated direct action (2021), to win a $50 million bond for housing under 30% Area Median Income (2022), to win $10.5 million for the City's housing trust fund (2022), to elect four members of City Council (2023), to defeat a $2 billion regressive tax that would have funded a downtown stadium (2024), and in recent years to support three properties towards the largest and longest rent strikes in regional history (2024-2025).

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Host or Publisher James Lawson Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements