Skip to main content
Earlier this month, WW reported how Ivory Mathews, the CEO of Home Forward, spent over $100,000 on agency-funded travel between 2023 and 2025, criss-crossing the country to attend housing conferences and networking events.
Traveling on the agency’s dime, Mathews spent an average of 45 days per year out of state, even as Home Forward, the city of Portland’s housing authority, struggled to fill empty units, allowed drug markets to enter some of their buildings, and saw their housing portfolio of 7,000 units inch closer to financial distress.
Until now, the outlier among those trips was an October 2024 visit to Hawaii, where she says she attended an insurance conference. That trip was unusual for its cost—more than $7,000—and the inability of the agency to provide any details of what Mathews did at the conference, including a schedule or any notes she took. Records obtained by WW last week show that three other high-level leaders at Home Forward traveled to Hawaii to attend insurance conferences in recent years, at a cost totaling around $24,000.
Now WW has learned that another destination was also popular with Home Forward staff.
WW has learned that Mathews took 10 agency staffers with her to a conference in Orlando in September 2024. The agency footed the bill for all 10 employees, and the total cost came to $20,445, according to agency spokesman Rylee Ahnen. He says that includes Mathews’ costs.
At the time, Mathews was campaigning to be elected senior vice president of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, the industry association putting on many of the conferences Mathews attended, including the event at the Orlando World Center Marriott.
Mathews was running for the association board position unopposed. Yet she appears to have nonetheless launched an aggressive campaign.
Photos posted to Mathews’ social media accounts show dozens of pictures she took at various conferences of her campaign booth, where she handed out campaign flyers, pins stamped with images of her face, and dangly earrings that Mathews says she made by hand. She posted frequently online about her endorsements from fellow housing officials, and took photos of supporters next to her campaign booth or donning the earrings.
Ahnen told WW today that some of the 10 agency staff who attended the Orlando conference in September 2024 with Mathews helped her campaign.
“Some of the staff attending the Orlando conference volunteered at her campaign booth,” Ahnen says.
The agency insists it did not pay for any of Mathews’ campaign-related expenses. But agency staff who traveled to Orlando helped their boss campaign for an external position.
A year after the Orlando trip, in September 2025, Mathews flew to Phoenix for her swearing-in ceremony. Four Home Forward executives joined her on that trip: the agency’s chief financial officer, chief operating officer, chief people and culture officer, and its director of equity.
Jennifer McMillan, the president of AFSCME Local 3135, the union that represents 205 Home Forward employees, said earlier this week that her members had “no confidence or trust” in Mathews after learning of her travel expenses. At a meeting of the Home Forward board of commissioners Tuesday evening, union members told the board and Mathews just how angry and disheartened they were by the news.
Mathews, though she made brief remarks at the top of the board meeting and promised the agency was committed to hearing concerns and responding to them, did not respond to any of her employees’ comments or questions.
Home Forward’s board has defended Mathews, saying her travel to conferences allows the CEO to learn important lessons and apply them at Home Forward.
