The Work Accomplished This Year

As this year comes to a close, Destination: Home is reflecting on the collective efforts to end and prevent homelessness made this year, and sharing some of the work we have planned for 2025. 

The broad coalition of partners that comprise our Supportive Housing System helped more than 2,000 formerly homeless households move into permanent homes this year, thanks in large part to a dozen new affordable housing developments that opened throughout the county. Our system has also increased our community’s capacity to prevent an episode of homelessness before it begins, which is a key component in ultimately solving this crisis. As a result of these and many other coordinated efforts, our community is closer to the shared goal of housing more people than are pushed into homelessness.

At Destination: Home, we help coordinate and fund the collective efforts that result in long-term solutions, guided by the shared strategies and goals of the 2020-2025 Community Plan to End Homelessness. Here’s a closer look at our work this year:

• In a demonstration of true systems change, the County of Santa Clara assumed management of the Homelessness Prevention System, establishing the pilot we’ve incubated since 2017 as our county’s primary homelessness prevention strategy. Nearly 2,500 households received financial assistance and other support through the program this year and the County has committed to funding and leading prevention work throughout our community going forward – including leveraging their broader safety net to better support households at risk of becoming homeless.
• We co-founded and launched the Bay Area Housing Innovation Fund, leveraging private capital and a new financing model to help drive down affordable housing development costs and timelines. Created in partnership with the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund, Sobrato Philanthropies and Apple, the initial $50 million pilot will support at least four projects in the Bay Area with aggressive cost and time goals that are 40% lower than similar developments.
• In response to growing efforts to criminalize the experience of homelessness – which disproportionately affects people of color – we launched a new anti-criminalization initiative and are working closely with community stakeholders on solutions to address the many challenges posed by our homelessness crisis without making it harder for our unhoused neighbors to simply survive. 
• To foster a growing national movement to center lived experience in the work to address homelessness, we hosted nearly 400 attendees from 40 states and Canada (over 75% with lived experience of homelessness) at the 2024 National Lived Experience Leadership Conference. The joyous and important gathering was designed by and for people with lived experience to develop leadership skills and build power to mobilize for action to end homelessness.

Yet, there’s much work still to be done with homelessness remaining an urgent crisis, largely due to systemic forces left unaddressed for decades. We know it’s possible to end and prevent homelessness and we remain committed to building on the collective impact our community has achieved through strategic, evidence-based strategies. 

In 2025, we plan to invest more than $23 million in private and philanthropic funding, focusing on three key areas that continue to tackle the root causes of homelessness and support long-term solutions.