Winona Area Kitchen Table

Three Years at the Kitchen Table: Reflecting, Celebrating, and Passing the Torch

This webpage celebrates the Winona Area Kitchen Table, a program of Engage Winona that operated from 2023-2026. The Kitchen Table brought together Winona residents who knew housing instability firsthand to advocate for policy changes that would help prevent homelessness.

As the program’s funding came to an end in 2026, we honored the program’s accomplishments through a mini documentary film, and encouraged our community to continue supporting policy changes and services that help make housing more attainable for more people in Winona County.

The program existed against a backdrop of real need. Winona County’s 2024 housing study found more than 1,000 housing units were needed in the next five years. More than half of renters in Winona County (51%) are cost-burdened in 2026, paying over 30% of their income on rent. Rental vacancy is below 2%, and homes for sale move quickly with less than three months of inventory. There are stark racial gaps in homeownership, and Winona County still has no year-round overnight shelter as of fall 2026, despite ongoing need.

Engage Winona’s past listening work highlighted many of these issues. In 2016 and 2021, broad-based community engagement showed us the same message again and again: We don’t have enough housing options, and what exists often doesn’t fit people’s needs.

Why the Kitchen Table Was Created

Engage Winona’s work is rooted in civic participation and lived experience leadership, the belief that everyone has gifts to bring, and that folks who’ve walked the hardest paths often know best what needs to change. Data and professional expertise are important, but when people with lived experience are truly at the table, decisions better reflect what it’s actually like to navigate housing instability.

In 2023, with support from Foundations for Home, we launched the Winona Area Kitchen Table to focus on “upstream” solutions: the policies, systems, and supports that can help people avoid homelessness in the first place.

The Kitchen Table was made up of community members with lived experience of housing instability in Winona County. Together, they:

Shared their own stories of trying to find and keep housing
Mapped where support was missing, in policies, programs, and community
Identified realistic changes that could be made within a relatively short time of 2-3 years

From there, they took a leading role in bringing housing forward at both the local and state level:

Created a mural with local artist The Joy Labs
Advocated for a local housing trust fund
Supported zoning changes to allow more and different types of housing
Participated in advocacy and awareness efforts around homeless shelter approval
Joined local work groups and committees, bringing lived-experience voices directly into decision-making
Worked with Kitchen Tables in Duluth and the Twin Cities on statewide housing policy
Testified at the state legislature, helping shape policies with real-world insight

Passing the Torch

The formal funding for the Winona Area Kitchen Table ended in 2026, and with it, this particular program. But the work, and the responsibility, belong to all of us now.

Kitchen Table members have left a legacy, from the concrete changes they helped move forward to the ripple effects of more lived expertise at the table. They also left a charge to the community in a recent letter to the editor, which you can read in the Winona Post here, or below.

As the program ends, Kitchen Table members are passing the torch back to Winona: asking all of us – neighbors, leaders, nonprofits, public officials, landlords, and community members – to continue listening to lived experience and to keep working toward attainable housing for everyone. Winona will be stronger when everyone, from teachers to health care aides to construction workers, has a home they can afford.

As you watch the film and read the Kitchen Table’s letter, we invite you to ask:

What role can I play in making housing more attainable in Winona County?

Winona Area Kitchen Table Letter to the Community

We love Winona and consider it our home, whether we were born here or moved here later in life. We write this letter as people who have lived through housing instability and homelessness in our community.

For some of us, it meant sleeping in our cars. For others, it meant staying with friends or family, worrying about where we would go next, or trying to keep life together while quietly struggling. Homelessness looks different for everyone and is often an invisible experience. Many people experiencing homelessness do not fit the stereotypes people may have in mind.

Our unhoused neighbors are already here in our neighborhoods. They are our coworkers, friends, family members, classmates, and community members. They need a safe place to go, and they deserve to be treated with dignity and compassion.

Over the past few years, through the Winona Area Kitchen Table, we have had the opportunity to come together as people with lived experience, community members, organizations, and local leaders to have honest conversations about housing in our community. We are grateful for everyone who listened to our stories, sat at the table with us, asked difficult questions, and took action alongside us.

Because of this collective work, we have seen progress. We have seen people come together, relationships form, and more people paying attention to housing issues in Winona. We have learned that when people who have lived these experiences are included in the conversation, change can happen.

But we are not done.

The Winona Area Kitchen Table is ending only because its grant funding is ending, not because the work is complete. We believe we have been planting seeds. We have started important conversations and built relationships that we hope continue long after this program ends. Now is the time to keep moving from talking about housing to taking action.

Winona is small enough that we know our neighbors and care about one another. We are also small enough to work together and create solutions together. It takes a village. The responsibility of ensuring everyone has a safe place to call home belongs to all of us.

We invite our community to continue asking questions, building partnerships, listening to people with lived experience, and taking action. Real change happens when neighbors show up for one another.

Thank you to every resident, organization, volunteer, advocate, and community partner who has been part of this journey. We hope this letter reminds us all that housing is a community responsibility. We still have work to do, but we believe that when people come together, listen to one another, and take action, meaningful change is possible. Together, we can continue building a Winona where everyone has a place to belong and a safe place to call home.

Sincerely,

The Winona Area Kitchen Table