Jianna Hopkins-Israel describes herself as “kind, colorful, curious.” She also sees herself as a connector. Those words are more than personality traits. They shape how she approaches housing equity, lived experience, and the work of bringing people together across difference.
Jianna’s world is rooted in art, culture, creativity, and hospitality. Outside of work, she loves painting, drawing, cooking, baking, mixology, wine, and the beauty of unique things. For her, art is not confined to a canvas. It exists in food, drinks, culture, place, and the ways people express themselves.
“I like different cultures,” she said. “I like different foods. I like to just embrace the differences of people.”
That curiosity carries into her work as a Housing Equity Strategist. Jianna is deeply interested in the complexity of people, and she resists systems that flatten people into categories. What keeps her grounded is “the people that it impacts” and “the reality of what it means for people to be seen.”
“When people feel as if they’re taken seriously and looked after and cared for and heard, that’s what keeps me grounded,” she said. “Sometimes I can give what I haven’t gotten.”
Jianna describes her role as a Housing Equity Strategist as being a liaison across different layers of power. The title itself matters to her because it creates recognition and access. “It’s beautiful that we have a name,” she said. “It does hold a certain weight.”
She sees the role as allowing her to move between different spaces, from community members to decision makers. “Being a Housing Equity Strategist opens doors for ability to talk to different changemakers, whether they be CEOs or people on the street,” she said. “It grants us access and it allows us to move among those channels pretty fluidly and effectively.”
That movement between spaces is essential to how Jianna thinks about change. She is always looking for common ground, especially in a time when conversations around housing, homelessness, and power can become polarized. Her goal is to find shared reference points that allow people to understand experiences they may never have lived themselves.
“I’m looking for commonality,” she said. “In order for someone to understand another person’s perspective of something they have no reference point for, you need to find a common reference point.”
For Jianna, this is also where hospitality enters the work. Hospitality is not just about welcoming someone into a room. It is about making sure the room is built in a way that allows them to participate fully. That means paying attention to language, access, social dynamics, and the subtle ways people are made to feel like outsiders.
She is especially aware of how people with lived experience can be “othered” even when they are technically included. “Even with people with lived experience of homelessness being integrated into these decision-making tables, it’s still an other persona,” she said. “They’re treated different, their exposure is different, the communication is different.”
To Jianna, meaningful inclusion requires level setting. It means lowering barriers without lowering standards. “We’re not lowering standards,” she said. “We’re just raising it for everyone to achieve.”
Her commitment to questioning systems began early. Jianna remembers being the kind of child who challenged rules that did not make sense. She refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance because she felt it did not reflect the reality around her. “Until they live up to the standards within that Pledge of Allegiance, I’m not pledging nothing,” she said.
In ninth grade, she began to understand how power moves through society. A world civilization class gave her language for the patterns she had already felt: contradiction, exclusion, and the ways power is maintained. “I really got hit to the idea how power moves,” she said. “Housing is a way that people maintain and generate wealth.”
Her lived experience continues to shape her work today. A house fire revealed major gaps in support for families experiencing crisis. Jianna saw how little help existed when a single family lost everything. “Until it happens to you, it’s not a thought,” she said. The experience also showed her how power operates through legal systems, landlords, paperwork, and language that most people are never taught to understand.
“You’re at the mercy of the people in power a lot of the times,” she said.
In her current work as a case manager, Jianna brings these lessons into direct practice. She listens carefully to people’s preferences and pushes back against the idea that any available housing is automatically the right fit. “Just because it’s a place doesn’t mean it’s a place for them,” she said.
She believes ignoring someone’s uniqueness can create more harm. People have preferences, needs, fears, histories, and hopes. Housing is not only about placement. It is about dignity, belonging, and being able to live somewhere without feeling erased.
Jianna also wants people to understand the everyday barriers of homelessness that are often invisible to those who have never experienced them. Something as basic as not having an address can make it difficult to get a phone, access benefits, verify identity, use a credit card, or receive mail. “The way our world is engineered to verify who you are, it requires you to be rooted somewhere,” she said. “And if you’re not rooted somewhere, you are not a person.”
That is one of the biggest misunderstandings about homelessness. People see the most visible forms of homelessness and make assumptions. They do not see the systems that make survival harder.
Jianna’s work is also shaped by improv, which helped her find her voice and become less afraid of imperfection. “Improv took away that fear of always being perfect,” she said. It taught her to respond thoughtfully, be aware of others in the room, and accept that no one has the perfect answer.
That lesson connects directly to systems change. Policy can become rigid, overly planned, and disconnected from human beings. Jianna wants to bring the human part back. “You need to have the data be people too,” she said. “Those data points are always people.”
When people read about her work, Jianna hopes they understand that she genuinely loves “the complexity and the simplicity in people.” She compares people to wine, shaped by soil, geography, weather, region, and time. Every person carries layers.
“We’re all just trying to figure this out,” she said. “Everybody just wants to feel like they belong.”
That is the heart of Jianna’s work: belonging. Through curiosity, hospitality, and care, she is helping build spaces where people are not just invited in, but recognized as whole.
