Dear Friends,
We are pleased to share our 2016 Annual Report for the Community Plan to End Homelessness with you. We have seen some very exciting things happen during the second year of our collective work, most notably the passage of Measure A, Santa Clara County’s $950 million affordable housing bond. But Measure A wasn’t our only reason to celebrate, because we’ve also seen more than 1,700 people end their homelessness this year alone. We have also facilitated serious improvements in how our community is utilizing housing subsidies and how we are collectively solving our housing access challenges. As a result we are seeing savings in our safety net system and new resources committed to focus on families, youth, and veterans.
We’ve also seen the emergence of active, outcomes focused partnerships with jurisdictions working together to set common goals and robustly fund joint efforts to house individuals and families in their cities. The County of Santa Clara is working in partnership with the cities of Santa Clara, Mountain View, and Palo Alto with a focus on pairing rental subsidies and services to house our most vulnerable citizens, our Continuum of Care has implemented a new coordinated entry system and we’ve had an impressive $48 million joint funding opportunity between the County of Santa Clara, the Housing Authority and the City of San Jose designed to facilitate new Supportive Housing developments. We’ve also had more than 510 veterans permanently housed in year one of the All The Way Home campaign.
We are two years into the Community Plan and we aren’t slowing down. 2017 will bring the roll out of Measure A, along with implementing new Rapid Rehousing, Employment and Homelessness Prevention systems targeting vulnerable families and youth. Our community has been able to make this tremendous progress thanks to the hard work of our excellent nonprofits who work every day to ensure folks have access to homes and the support they need to thrive in partnership with our public and private partners who are investing in solutions that permanently end homelessness.
We can and we will make homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring in our community.
Read the complete 2016 Annual Report.
In Partnership,
Jennifer Loving
Executive Director