Powerlist – Ali Rabe – Executive Director – Jesse Tree

Ali Rabe is an experienced attorney who’s worked in the public sector for a decade and joined her role at Jesse Tree five years ago. In the last 18 months, she has been a part of incredible growth. During that time, she and her team have prevented eviction for nearly 2,000 families, administering $2.7 million in emergency rental assistance as well as supportive services.

On the horizon, Rabe and her team at Jesse Tree are doing their part in the Campaign to End Family Homelessness with CATCH and BCACHA (Boise City Ada County Housing Authority), with a goal of ending homelessness for children and families by 2026. The organization is also partnering with the City of Boise and Duane and Lori Stueckle’s matching fund, which will prevent eviction for an additional 250 families over the next two years. Further, they are working alongside KeyBank which is providing them with funding to support tenants as well as a community health worker position who can connect people to resources when they can’t pay their rent due to a health emergency.

Rabe is passionate about changing the narrative around homelessness and is hopeful that while it’s still a hard problem to address ― it is still a solvable problem.

“Homelessness isn’t so bad in Idaho that we can’t get ahead of it,” she explained. “We have continued to try to change the message around our challenges with the housing crisis and a direct cause, homelessness, and offer solutions and hope ― as well as a strong directive that we must act quickly to avoid the mistakes that other states made by failing to address the problem before it was too late.”