Dillon Dhanecha

Since leaving school, I’ve experienced the fragility of living in my car and the privilege of deploying capital at will. The line between those two lives is thinner than I could ever have believed.

For a long time I thought of housing as an asset class. It took years of working closely with housing organisations, care providers and the families they support to understand that a home is rarely the end of someone's story. Far more often, it is the beginning of it.

I have watched a person leave hospital because a suitable home existed, and I have watched a person remain in hospital because one did not. I have seen a young adult begin work because they finally had somewhere stable to sleep. I have seen a family stay together because a landlord thought differently about who they were willing to house. None of these outcomes required a new invention. They required someone to use what they already had.

That is the observation that led me here. In every room I sit in, there is capability that is not being pointed at housing need. There are people with land. People with capital. People with permissions. People who commission services. People who understand the need better than anyone but have never been asked what they would do with money. These worlds — housing, finance and care — are close together and rarely connected.

The Giving Pledge showed me something about public commitment. It did not pool anyone's money or tell anyone what to fund. It simply made a private intention visible, and in doing so it changed what a community of people considered normal. I have wanted a version of that for housing for more than a decade.

So this is my commitment. I promise to use the capital, capability and influence I have to help deliver the right homes for our most vulnerable citizens. In practice, that means continuing to invest in the creation and adaptation of homes for people whose needs are poorly served by the market. It means putting my time into the organisations already doing this work well, and helping them access capital on terms that do not compromise the people they serve.

It also means building this. Housing Pledge will not pool investment, direct anyone's capital or tell any Pledger what their contribution should look like. It exists to make individual commitments visible and to connect the professionals making them.

I do not believe the housing crisis will be solved by a single sector, a single policy or a single fund. I do believe it will look very different if a few thousand people who each hold a piece of the solution decide to use it deliberately rather than incidentally.

I am making this commitment publicly because public commitments are harder to quietly abandon, and because I would like others to feel able to make theirs. Mine is not the largest contribution that will be made here. I hope it is simply the first.