This funding has leveraged significant public dollars to catalyze 2,300 new supportive & extremely low income homes & prevent homelessness for more than 3,000 households
Since 2018, Destination: Home has invested more than $121 million in strategies that are driving meaningful action on the Community Plan to End Homelessness, addressing root causes, keeping at-risk households in their homes and improving the quality of life for our unsheltered neighbors.
The strategies we’ve invested in are saving lives and demonstrating what’s possible through a committed public-private partnership.
In March 2018, Cisco pledged $50 million dollars, the largest donation ever made by a corporation to address our local homelessness crisis. This groundbreaking contribution seeded our efforts to leverage private funding to end and prevent homelessness.
In 2019, Apple contributed another $50 million to create new deeply affordable housing and prevent homelessness for thousands of households at-risk, and several other corporate and philanthropic donors have since made sizable contributions to our community’s collective work.
To be clear, our work is far from done as there are still far too many people, disproportionately people of color, living outside and facing extreme financial insecurity, only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s still important to recognize the gains that private funding has made possible.
More Than 2,300 New Homes Funded
In the last four years, Destination: Home has invested nearly $50 million alone in affordable housing developments, spurring the creation of 25 new developments with 2,300 homes for the currently unhoused or at-risk households with extremely low incomes.
Deeply affordable and supportive housing simply won’t be built without dedicated funding, and public resources alone can’t meet the demand. This is why we are providing flexible grants and no- or low-interest financing for acquisition and pre-development to fund this desperately needed housing.
New developments like The Charles, a planned community of 99 homes for vulnerable families in San Jose, utilized our early stage funding to secure the land and put the plans in motion to develop this wonderful new site. Named in honor of a medical professional who did everything he could to serve people living outside, this development will help people get off the streets and into stable, permanent housing.
We’re also investing in ways to build affordable housing faster and have already reduced the review timeline of deeply affordable and supportive housing development by more than 20% through a capacity-building grant to the City of San Jose’s planning department.
These investments are driving progress towards the Community Plan to End Homelessness goal to house 20,000 people by 2025. Our supportive housing system is already a quarter of the way there, having permanently housed approximately 5,000 people since 2020.
Preventing Homelessness for More Than 3,000 Households
In 2017 we launched a new countywide Homelessness Prevention System which has reached more than 3,000 households to date, with more than 90 percent of those served remaining stably housed.
20 nonprofit organizations – led by Sacred Heart Community Service – administer the program, serving families throughout Santa Clara County. On average it costs $4,800 to successfully address a family’s housing crisis and keep them from entering homelessness.
20,000 Households Assisted During the Pandemic
Within weeks of our community shutting down due to COVID-19, we moved quickly to raise additional private funding to rapidly expand our Homelessness Prevention System in an effort to prevent a massive new wave of displacement and homelessness.
Roughly 20,000 households, 95% identifying as households of color, have been served across 70 non profit organizations since the start of the pandemic.
Reaching tens of thousands of households on the brink of homelessness has been a true demonstration of public-private collaboration. New and existing funders donated generously, and the flexibility of private money enabled us to move quickly right when the pandemic began, deploying financial relief before any state or federal assistance was available.
Investing in Lived Expertise
We are deeply committed to elevating decision making by people with lived homelessness expertise. This is critical for our community as we work to improve our systems, address the root causes of homelessness and create equitable initiatives that work.
For example, a recent $1 million grant to create a new interim housing site near Guadalupe River Park is contingent on the inclusion of lived expertise leading the design and operations processes, further deepening the way we and our partners are including lived experience in ground-up decision-making for new housing programs.
We’re also investing in the capacity of the Lived Experience Advisory Board (LEAB), a leadership body which has been providing policy guidance, funding recommendations, and evaluation efforts aimed at improving Santa Clara County’s supportive housing system since 2018. LEAB is bringing expertise to our homeless services, providing consultation and advocacy for improving our supportive housing system, and offering a shared community for its members.
And this year we’ve launched a new capacity building grant program for small nonprofit partners led by people of color and/or those with lived homelessness experience. Through these grants, we’re seeking to create a stronger and larger group of organizations working collaboratively to achieve the goals of the Community Plan to End Homelessness.
The Funders That Make These Gains Possible
This progress wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of dozens of public and private funders who’ve collectively invested the hundreds of millions of dollars we’ve channeled into our community’s efforts to end homelessness. We are grateful to our partners and look forward to the work ahead together.
