It’s Time to Open the Door to Better Homes & Communities

It’s Time to Open the Door to Better Homes & Communities

Posted on May 9, 2016

Imagine yourself, for just a minute, without a safe home in a good community, and what that would mean to you, your family, your friends and everyone’s prospects….the picture is pretty bleak.  That’s the goal of a new campaign called #OpenTheDoor which was launched today by the national movement Home Matters®.

The campaign plans to spark a conversation about the lack of safe homes and livable communities, nationally and in California’s San Joaquin Valley.  In addition, the campaign helps connect people to non-profit organizations across the country.

To launch #OpenTheDoor, Home Matters worked with Wondros, the LA-based production company and creative agency founded by director Jesse Dylan, to create a stop-motion animation film that sees the issue through the eyes of a child playing with a dollhouse she crafted from found materials. Wondros’s past clients include the ONE campaign, George Soros and the Open Society Foundations, The Clinton Global Initiative, The Guggenheim, The Getty, Stand Up 2 Cancer, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University. This film, “American Dream Dollhouse,” conveys the role of a home and community in unlocking an individual’s potential. Watch it here.

The campaign also features a national search tool that will connect people who want to donate, volunteer or are in need, to more than 330 Home Matters supporting organizations across America.

As one of the richest countries in the world, America has significant work to do in building better homes and communities. It has a homeless population of more than half a million people; 55% of the nation are making big sacrifices just to pay their rent or mortgage; over 20 million are living in unaffordable rental units; 5.2 million homeowners are living in deteriorating, physically inadequate homes that threaten their well-being; and thousands of communities lack good schools, parks and grocery stores – to name a few.  This negatively affects an individual’s health, education, financial and personal success, but also America’s collective success as a nation.

With a national election looming, Home Matters hopes the video will not only help motivate Americans to care passionately about this critical social issue but also elevate it among policy-makers, and galvanize the private-sector to get more involved.