Financial & Rental Assistance

Please note: the application period has closed for most State and Local COVID-19 rental assistance programs (including the ones described on this page). If you need help paying rent, you may be eligible to receive assistance through the Santa Clara County Homelessness Prevention System.

When COVID-19 began we knew that it would be our lowest-income families of color who would be hardest hit and that the sudden and extraordinary loss of income could put many low-income households at serious risk of homelessness. So, we mobilized quickly alongside Sacred Heart Community Service and dozens of other public and private partners to meet this impending crisis.

Working in collaboration with Silicon Valley Strong and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s COVID-19 Regional Response fund, we began aggressively fundraising to help secure resources for families and individuals in-need. Thanks to the generosity of dozens of public and private funders, we raised tens-of-millions of dollars to support families in need.

We also developed the infrastructure to reach and assist vulnerable residents in our community. While we knew we could leverage our countywide Homelessness Prevention System, it only had the capacity to assist approximately 1,500 at-risk households per year. So, we established special time-limited assistance programs to help the tens of thousands of additional households who found themselves in financial crisis.

This coordinated effort provided more than $85.4 million in rental and financial assistance to 19,695 low-income households in need during the pandemic.

Read more about the COVID-19 rental and financial assistance effort in the fact sheet below:

Download COVID-19 Financial & Rental Relief Info Sheet

Partnering with Organizations Throughout the Community

Our efforts to reach tens-of-thousands of vulnerable residents during the pandemic would not have been possible without the support of more than 70 partner organizations who helped enroll and disburse funds to residents throughout our community.

In particular, this partnership included approximately 50 small grassroots groups with deep and trusted relationships in different parts of our community. As part of our COVID-19 response, we granted millions of dollars to these organizations to help us reach and assist residents in neighborhoods that were historically and chronically under-resourced and where we knew COVID-19 had the most severe impacts.