While growing up in Southfield, Michigan, Jessica Eiland Anders volunteered doing home repair and clean-up for community members in Metro-Detroit and found herself impressed by the power of a house as something more than “a place where you lay your head down.” That was the beginning of a persistent question that has moved her: “How does your home become your sanctuary?”
After high school, Jessica studied Psychology, African American Studies, and Urban and Community Studies at the University of Michigan; her volunteering turned into internships in community organizing. But it wasn’t until she enrolled in graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis that she really understood that her passion for supporting others through the process of creating a home that becomes their sanctuary could become a professional career. She remained in St. Louis for eight years after receiving her MSW degree, working for three housing and community development organizations, among them Northside Community Housing, where she was president: “We designed and developed a lease purchase program… that allowed some of our residents who lived in low-income, tax-credit housing as renters to go on to purchase their homes and become first-time homeowners.”
When Jessica returned to Michigan in 2019, she worked in the Office of the President at The Skillman Foundation; it was there she first heard of Reparation Generation. Now she works at Enterprise Community Partners, one of the largest nonprofit affordable housing providers in the country. “I think the work that Rep Gen is doing furthers the type of work that I have done throughout my career. We are not only supporting community members to purchase homes that they can call their own, but in the process, we are also providing a means for reparative transfers of wealth that have been withheld from black community members for generations.”