Local Hero

Nancy Kenyon

Ms. Kenyon has over 40 years of experience in the housing discrimination field.

As an individual, she has been involved in fair housing work since 1963, when she worked with Lee Porter at the Fair Housing Council of Northern New Jersey. One of her most rewarding tasks of those early days was working with Lee to talk HUD into initiating a funding program for private fair housing groups, known by you all as FHIP grants.

For twelve years she was Housing Director of the Fair Housing Council of Northern New Jersey, during which time she directed fair housing projects for the Ford Foundation and acted as a training consultant for the States of New York and New Jersey and the City of New York.

In 1979, Ms. Kenyon moved to California and worked as a housing consultant for the NAACP Special Contribution Fund's school desegregation litigation in San Francisco. She has directed Fair Housing of Marin, a nonprofit agency dedicated to equal housing opportunity and human rights, since 1984. In 1988 she was the recipient of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian Award by the Marin County Human Rights Commission, and in 1992, received the Trude Baum Mental Health Award for outstanding community service to the mentally ill from the Mental Health Association of Marin. In 1998, she was awarded the Clarence R. Johnson, Sr. Award, from U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development, Pacific/Hawaii Region for outstanding fair housing service.

Ms. Kenyon is a founder and currently serves on the Board of the National Fair Housing Alliance in Washington, D.C. She is also a founder and Director of the Marin Continuum of Housing and Services and the Marin County Roundtable on Hate Violence