Lisa Carlos will share facts on local housing crisis and demographics, solutions, and advocacy strategies using projection of slides with information.

Carlos, a policy analyst, will frame the problem and suggest a pathway to improvement. She will talk about who is being impacted the most by this crisis and how. Please come to Parish Hall at 2:00 pm on Friday April 7 and bring your friends and neighbors! The Alliance program series is open to all members of USSB and the public.

Lisa Carlos began her career in Washington, D.C., evaluating migrant farmworker programs and policies for the U.S. Department of Education and National Commission on Migrant Education. In California, she spent over a decade advising state and local education policymakers as the director of research for two non-profits, WestEd and EdSource. She is currently a Commissioner for the City of Santa Barbara Housing Authority and serves on the board of Habitat for Humanity of Southern Santa Barbara County and the League of Women Voters where she advocates for and analyzes affordable housing — a topic she began monitoring while living in the Bay Area. Lisa grew up and attended public schools in Santa Barbara. She earned a BA in political science from Stanford and a Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Each Alliance meeting is held on the first Friday afternoon of the month at 2:00 PM in Parish Hall, from October to June. The program series is open to all members of USSB and the public. You are warmly invited to come, and bring a friend!

About The Alliance

In addition to holding the monthly speaker series, the Alliance is a charitable organization. An endowment built on gifts and bequests of its members enables it to make charitable donations. During the months it was not able to meet, the Alliance continued to make gifts to USSB and to charitable and non-profit organizations and causes in our area. Since 2020 the Alliance has given to the 805 Undocufund, the USSB Minister’s Pastoral COVID-19 Fund, the Santa Barbara Immigrant Legal Defense Center, the Church Without Walls fund for enabling USSB to offer online services, the USSB Sumi Nungwa Hopi and Navajo outreach, and the current project of refurbishing rooms at USSB for the use of our members and community groups. This endowment has also allowed the Alliance to provide thank-you gifts to speakers for the non-profit organizations they represent. These have included The Feminists of Cambridge Documentaries, the Alternatives to Violence Project, the Sanctuary Center, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the USSB Music Fund, and the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County. Founded in 1888 by a group of Unitarians who remembered the liberal Unitarian services they had enjoyed in their homes on the East Coast, the Alliance was rooted in the ethical and spiritual values of Unitarianism and devoted to ensuring the success of the Unitarian community in Santa Barbara.