Understand the state of your local housing in a half day.

Housing 101 Workshop

“Affordable” means different things to different people—but without a shared understanding, local conversations stall. This workshop helps community leaders demystify affordability, understand local cost drivers, and build a foundation for action rooted in facts, clarity, and local values. Local leaders will walk away with a practical understanding of why affordability matters, a shared vocabulary, and tools to guide community-aligned housing action.

Who it’s for: City managers, planning staff, economic development professionals, chambers of commerce, philanthropic partners, elected officials, and local committee members.

Pricing and Timing: From $7,500, 6-week lead time

Book a Discovery + Fit Call →

It’s the right fit…

For these roles:

Coalitions of nonprofits, cities, and funders coming together on regional housing
Community foundations with active housing portfolios

Chambers of commerce leading housing or workforce initiatives
Elected officials, planning commissioners, and municipal staff with housing mandates
Developers and community advocates

With these conditions:

There’s assumptions, confusion, and a lot of questions when leaders discuss housing
Key stakeholders from different sectors don’t speak the same language
There’s misinformation on how policies and investments shape affordability
Regional housing crisis making local headlines
New county or city executive with a housing mandate

This workshop was designed to address these challenges:

Our planning department and community stakeholders keep having the same housing conversation without making progress.

Stakeholders can't agree on the scope of the problem, let alone the solution.

A foundation has seeded housing work but it's fragmented across grantees with no shared framework.

A plan exists to solve our housing issue but momentum keeps dying in committee.

Your mayor or executive is ready to lead but needs a coalition behind them.

What You Get

1-hour pre-workshop planning call
Optional pre-workshop participant survey—recommended for groups over 25
Half-day facilitated workshop with custom materials
30-day follow-up coaching call

Investment

From $7,500 (half day)
6-week lead time

How It Works

We’ll meet virtually to understand the coalition, the stakes, the friction, and the desired outcome. If we're not the right move, we say so on the call.
We send a written proposal with format, attendance target, and fixed price. Contract plus 40% deposit to lock the date.
Our team customizes the agenda based on a shared understanding of the audience and key outcomes.
Flywheel leads the session. Participants leave with shared understanding of what levers your community can pull to impact affordability.
A 30-minute coaching call with the convener 30 days later to review what's moved, what hasn't, and what's next.

Common Questions

Ideal is 20–40 people representing the full decision-making geometry — cities, counties, CDCs, funders, builders, employers. Under 15 and you're missing voices; over 50 and dynamics shift. We've run sessions as small as 12 and as large as 65.
The full-day format is designed for in-person. Interactive exercises don't translate well to video. We can run a half-day virtual adaptation for $12,000 when in-person isn't feasible, but the outcomes are meaningfully weaker.
This is common — and often exactly why the workshop works. The pre-workshop planning sessions surface the conflict honestly. The workshop gives the room a structured way to work through it instead of around it. We don't pretend conflict doesn't exist.
Three things, reliably: shared language (everyone leaves with the same vocabulary), shared facts (the data brief becomes a reference document), and shared 30-day commitments (explicit, in writing, named owners). Anything more — a funded initiative, a new policy, a capital campaign — depends on what your coalition does with those three things.
No. Regional workshops are almost always multi-stakeholder (10+ orgs); city-level workshops are usually single-organization (department leads, council, advisory board). Both formats exist — the pre-call determines which is right.
Yes. The default framing is 'housing system' because that's how most regional coalitions think. We also deliver topic-specific versions — zoning reset, financing reset, engagement reset — for organizations with a narrower scope. Same price structure.

“Flywheel helped us see opportunities we didn’t know existed. Their ability to connect policy, financing, and community vision gave us the confidence to move forward on projects that seemed impossible before. They don’t just give you a plan — they help you build the momentum to actually make it happen.”

- Mason County Chamber of Commerce / The Right Place