A proposed affordable housing tour with elected officials and faith leaders aims to highlight several housing sites, noting the diversity of faith-based housing and more in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. But Melanie Steele, Executive Director of the Inland SoCal Housing Collective (ISHC), also hopes the outing will illuminate greater opportunities and the barriers to tackle.
“This will lead into our annual Affordable Housing Mixer with affordable developers, and investors and private investors, as well as local cities, where there’s opportunities to make connections across county lines,” Steele added. “It’s wonderful to see developers and city leaders meet each other and understand their needs for different projects. This helps all of us.”
The event is one of many standout initiatives playing out underneath the ISHC umbrella. A recent grant from Inland Empire Community Foundation (IECF) through their Community Impact Fund is yet another opportunity for ISHC to expand its impact and reach.
“The grant helped us expand across all our working pillars,” Steele said. “The Collective has four pillars, but there are three foundational ones where we look at for policies.”
There’s the Educate and Advocate for Public Policy pillar, which organizes and strives to gain public will and political support for region-specific housing policies and solutions related to such things as zoning changes, A.D.U./ancillary units, enforcement of SB 35-inclusionary units, workforce housing, and more.
Educating individuals on the housing landscape, market trends, and housing platforms also factors into the mix.
“That pillar can be improved to expand ways to produce affordable housing and attract funding to our region,” Steele added.
Wealth Building and Preservation is another pillar.
“We look at what wealth-building tools exist here to ensure that generational wealth is being created as well as preserved,” Steele said. “Banking and first-loan access falls into that.”
The Expansion of Housing Solutions stands out in the ways it explores the innovative solutions for housing that exist and how the organization and the community can learn from it.
“The IECF grant allows us to be driven in these working groups, not just for us as an organization but for the area and the people,” Steele said. “The grant helps us build out in that way so we can be more committed, do the research, and create thoughtful agendas, invite in speakers, and facilitate the working pillars to really move these strategies.
“It builds our capacity to put things into action for both San Bernardino and Riverside County,” she added.
Another organizational pillar that is active year-round is ISHC’s Increasing Regional Involvement pillar. It strives to create a unified voice on housing solutions in the area and identify marketing strategies to attract and leverage new kinds of funding and investments.
Membership acts as a kind of collective change agent, establishing a united front fully committed to enhancing the region’s reputation.
“Collectively, especially with just general housing, it’s so vast,” Steele said. “Therefore, we look at anything from shelters and emergency shelters to building market rate housing and everything in between.”
Steele is enthusiastic about the road ahead and ISHC’s ongoing mission to “advance collaborative strategies and present innovative solutions to create and preserve safe, decent, and affordable housing in the Inland SoCal region.”
“Every voice is needed in our space,” she said. “You don’t have to be a developer or a non-profit housing service provider, or someone that’s part of the community care. It’s more than that.
“The organization has folks from different foundations—from healthcare, education, cities, transportation—that are a part of the change,” she added. “There’s real value of working together. Everybody can have a voice here. Everybody can contribute.”
This story originally appeared in the Press Enterprise, February, 2026.
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