Community Art Project: Fair Housing Builds a Thriving, Inclusive, and Welcoming Community

To celebrate April Fair Housing Month, we invite you to participate in our Community Art Gallery.

Art has the power to help us make meaning of our collective and individual experiences and provides us with a tool to reflect. By celebrating and promoting fair housing through creative expression, we hope to create an opportunity for people of all ages, skills, abilities, and backgrounds to connect over what home, community, and inclusivity mean to them.

We are asking all artists (and that means you!) to reflect on the idea of fair housing in our community. Questions for reflection include:

• What comes to mind when you think of a thriving, inclusive, and welcoming community?
• Are there things that can make communities more inclusive?
• Why is inclusion important?
• How might you represent your ideas in a drawing, photograph, collage, sculpture, or another medium?

Scroll down to read instructions on how to submit your work and view the gallery.

About the Fair Housing Act

The Fair Housing Act was enacted to end discrimination in housing. The US House of Representatives passed the Act on April 10th, 1968. President Johnson signed the bill into law the following day.

Officially known as Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of dwellings, and in other housing-related transactions, because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, and disability. Virginia Fair Housing Law also prohibits discrimination based on elderliness, source of funds, sexual orientation, gender identity, and military status.

The Fair Housing Act and other fair housing laws protect your family’s right to live anywhere they want and can afford to live. When looking for a place to call home, you should not be treated differently because of your race, color, sex, familial status (whether your family has children), religion, national origin (what country you’re from), or disability. It’s illegal to treat some people less favorably than others without any fair or proper reason. That is discrimination.

The Fair Housing Act is one of the most important laws in America because where you live affects all areas of your life including:

• access to living-wage jobs
• access to quality food and healthcare
• access to high performing schools
• access to safe lenders