Tyra Thomas describes herself in three words: “soldier, humanitarian, loyal.” Those words reflect how she approaches housing equity work in Minneapolis, where she has spent years organizing, advocating, and demanding that systems treat people with dignity and respect.
As a Housing Equity Strategist with Community Solutions, Tyra sees her role clearly. “My role as a housing equity strategist is to ensure that all human beings have a human right to housing that is fair, non-discriminative, and equitable, and has the potential for generational wealth.”
For Tyra, housing is not just about shelter. It is connected to justice, wealth, family, community, and survival. Her work is rooted in community activism, volunteerism, faith, and lived experience. She has experienced homelessness on and off for 20 years, both with children and without children. Those experiences shaped not only what she fights for, but how she understands the systems she is fighting against.
Right now, Tyra is especially focused on accountability. More specifically, financial accountability. She wants to know what happens to the money that systems claim is being used to house Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.
“I’m mostly focused in the area of accountability,” she said. “Financial accountability of systems who project they are doing what they can to get Black and Brown Indigenous bodies into housing, and it’s not true.”
Her focus comes from personal experience. In 2012, Tyra was in a housing program that she says financially exploited her. She later discovered that agencies were claiming funds for services she was not receiving. “They were claiming I was somewhere I wasn’t,” she said. “Claiming they were feeding me three times a day. They were claiming they were taking me to the doctor’s appointment, all of this stuff, and I was living in my own apartment.”
For Tyra, this was a turning point. She began asking harder questions about public dollars, housing systems, and who gets blamed when money is misused. She is especially critical of how fraud is racialized, with attention placed on Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, or refugee communities while white-led institutions avoid the same scrutiny.
“I want financial accountability of these agencies,” she said. “That’s what folks should be focusing on.”
Tyra’s understanding of housing injustice started long before that. At 17, with a baby, she was denied emergency assistance for a $350 apartment because the rent was $12 over what the system considered affordable. “The system was not forgiving,” she said. “Nickel and diming over $12 on whether or not I can have this unit.”
Looking back, she asks whether that denial was connected to systemic racism. She remembers dealing with a white intake worker and feeling that something was wrong, even if she did not yet have all the language to name it. That experience shaped how she thinks about prevention today. Communities talk about prevention funding, but Tyra sees people still struggling to access the basic resources needed to get into housing, including damage deposits and first month’s rent.
“There’s a whole lot of money around prevention in this town,” she said, “and yet it’s still not reaching folks.”
Tyra’s advocacy deepened through Street Voices of Change, a grassroots group of people with current or past experiences of homelessness. The group began in a church, with around 10 people sharing their experiences. Tyra remembers finding the group and thinking, “Oh, I found my tribe.”
At the time, she and others were discussing the treatment people were experiencing at the Salvation Army. Tyra described witnessing mistreatment, abuse, and fear of retaliation. “For the most part, people were, ‘Don’t say anything, don’t talk about it. They’ll retaliate, they’ll kick you out.’ And all this is true. But I’m just not that. I’m not a scaredy cat like that.”
Since 2016, Street Voices of Change has worked with the mayor’s office, advocated at the Capitol, attended Homeless Day on the Hill, and pushed for practical solutions rooted in lived experience. One example was the creation of a storage resource for people experiencing homelessness. Members recognized that people could not easily look for jobs or housing while carrying all their belongings and fearing those belongings might be gone when they returned.
That is the kind of practical insight Tyra believes systems need.
Her work with Community Solutions began through meaningful engagement. She says Amber Chandler took the time to build trust and understand who she was. “Amber did a great job of meaningfully engaging from first contact,” Tyra said. “And I want that for anyone with lived experience of homelessness, addiction, whatever.”
For Tyra, meaningful engagement is especially important for Black, Brown, and Indigenous people who have been harmed by systems and made to feel like they do not belong. She connects this to her own experiences in predominantly white schools and spaces, where she felt what she later came to understand as imposter syndrome.
When people with lived experience enter decision-making spaces, Tyra says they must be treated with dignity and respect. “If folks can’t do that,” she said, “get out the way.”
Tyra is also a trained organizer through Midwest Academy and now trains others on how to organize for justice. She teaches people how to identify decision makers, build a base, conduct one-to-ones, and use community resources to advance a cause. For her, organizing is not limited to housing justice. It can be used for climate justice, criminal legal reform, and any fight rooted in the greater good of community.
At the core of all Tyra’s work is a desire to make sure people are never treated the way she was treated. “I do this work because after experiencing homelessness on and off for 20 years with children, without children, that if it ever happens to me again, whether it be by fire, a hurricane, a job loss, redevelopment, divorce, medical, that I do not get treated like that again,” she said. “That I’m treated with dignity and respect. I’m a human being.”
That is the heart of Tyra’s advocacy: accountability, justice, and the insistence that every person deserves to be treated as human.
