Announcing the Launch of the Silicon Valley Guaranteed Income Project

Our community is suffering from a homelessness crisis that’s the result of several compounding and interrelated systemic inequities –a severe lack of affordable housing, systemic racism and decades of federal underinvestment in programs for our community’s most vulnerable residents and families.

To help address these deeply-rooted inequities pushing more of our families onto the streets, Destination: Home and İSí Se Puede! Collective are thrilled to announce the launch of the Silicon Valley Guaranteed Income Project!

150 Families Experiencing or At Risk of Homelessness Will Receive $1000/month in Flexible, Guaranteed Income For Two Years

We believe people are the experts of their own lives and know how to meet their needs, so the best solutions to our housing and homelessness crisis are those that empower families in their efforts and decisions toward achieving housing and financial stability. 

Through this guaranteed income project, 150 Santa Clara County families experiencing or at risk of homelessness will receive $1,000 a month for 24 months. The income comes with no strings attached, providing them with the opportunity to achieve greater independence over their lives, finances and future. 

This is one of the few guaranteed income projects specifically focused on unhoused and marginalized families.  

• Half of the participants were recruited from the County of Santa Clara’s Coordinated Entry System, allowing us to assist unhoused families for whom guaranteed income could help secure stable housing.
• Half of the participants are families affiliated with the İSí Se Puede! Collective’s network of service providers in East San Jose, allowing us to reach neighborhoods with a high proportion of families who are undocumented or mixed-status, facing overcrowding, unsuitable or unsafe living conditions,  and often disconnected from traditional safety net services. 

We also intentionally sought to center racial and gender equity, as people of color and women-led households are both over-represented in our target populations and disproportionately impacted by our region’s housing and affordability crisis.

Please Note: Participation and enrollment is by referral only, and the project is closed to new referrals at this time.

Guaranteed Income Can Help End Homelessness

In order to end homelessness in our community, we must address the root causes of our crisis through system and policy change. And guaranteed income holds enormous potential to be the type of policy change needed to address the long-standing systemic inequities driving our community’s homelessness and housing crisis.

Through this guaranteed income project, we intend to advance two key goals:

• Stabilize homeless and housing-insecure families by providing unconditional, no-strings-attached cash.
• Use the data and findings to shift narratives around guaranteed income and inform local, statewide and national policy.

To advance this second goal, our project includes an intensive research and evaluation component, led by the University of California San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, to assess the effectiveness of guaranteed income on participants’ housing and economic stability, health and overall well-being. The evaluation is designed as a mixed-methods randomized controlled trial and will be among the first U.S.-based studies of guaranteed income as a homelessness mitigation strategy. 

In the end, we believe that this project will help demonstrate the ways in which guaranteed income can help address Silicon Valley’s deep systemic inequities and severe homelessness crisis.