Funders Together to End Homelessness San Diego Announces $95,000 in Funding

Funders Together to End Homelessness San Diego (FTEHSD), a San Diego Grantmakers collaborative, is pleased to announce three recent grants to address homelessness in our region.

The grants, totaling $95,000, will support projects that increase the speed with which people experiencing homelessness move into permanent housing; support pre-construction costs for an innovative new affordable housing model; and, support data integrity and sharing across programs and providers to dramatically increase intervention effectiveness.

Regional Task Force on Homelessness received $40,000 in funding for leadership capacity to support innovative housing acquisition projects that move people experiencing homelessness more quickly into permanent housing. The grant funding will help leverage the $2.2 million in public funding from the RTFH’s Homeless Emergency Aid Program (HEAP) and the County of San Diego’s California Emergency Solutions Housing (CESH) program and ensure the RTFH has the ability to work closely with Brilliant Corners, a nationally recognized leader in operating Flexible Housing Pools, who was selected to implement San Diego’s pool.

The grant will ensure critical staffing infrastructure to coordinate and lead the development of the region’s Flexible Housing Pool (“Flex Pool”). The Flex Pool will improve San Diego’s homeless system by identifying and securing permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness with housing acquisition through landlord engagement, incentives, and master leasing.

“Funders Together to End Homelessness San Diego has been a key leader and supporter in the development of the Flexible Housing Pool and pushing innovation, alignment of public and private funding, and investing in best practices to get San Diegans experiencing homelessness into a permanent home as quickly as possible,” said Kris Kuntz, chief policy officer at RTFH.

Additionally, the funding will be used to advance development of a regional model and culture for implementing shared housing strategies. The Share Housing Program will allow people who are homeless to move more quickly into permanent housing by sharing with a roommate. The program sets up a central roommate and housing matching tool leveraging the city-wide Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) platform.

“Housing ends homelessness, and the RTFH and the San Diego region are very fortunate to have a collaboration of funders such as FTEHSD that believes in this and invests in innovative and creative solutions such as Flexible Housing Pools and shared housing to ultimately end homelessness in San Diego,” Kuntz added.

Yes in God’s Backyard (YIGBY) is a collaborative group of experienced real estate professionals, homeless advocates and philanthropic organizations who are partnering with faith communities to rapidly develop affordable housing on underutilized faith community properties, using a self-supporting, scalable model. FTEHSD has granted $30,000 toward pre–development costs on YIGBY’s first demonstration project to build 16 units of housing for homeless veterans on a church property in the Logan Heights neighborhood.

“The YIGBY Proof of Concept Project is in the early stages of moving through the complex pre-development phase, which can be difficult to secure funding for,” Mary Lydon, lead project consultant for YIGBY, explained.

The grant will be leveraged to secure a civil engineering report and the multiple discipline preliminary review required by the City of San Diego Development Services Department. “This phase requires dozens of tasks, technical reports, insurance, fees and permits – none of which can kick off without critical funding. YIGBY is grateful for this vote of confidence and we are proud to have FTEHSD on our team as an early innovation investor,” Lydon added.

The concept for YIGBY was originally incubated through two FTEHSD members, and YIGBY is fiscally sponsored by San Diego Grantmakers.

Interfaith Community Services has been awarded $25,000 for the expansion of their agency-wide client services database to strengthen Homeless Prevention Flex Funding data, and dramatically upgrade Interfaith’s ability to use data to track and improve the performance across 45+ programs serving more than 17,000 people each year.

“The best way to end homelessness is to prevent it from ever happening,” said Greg Anglea, CEO of Interfaith Community Services.

“Partnering with 2-1-1, San Diego State University, and other service providers, we’ll track long-term housing outcomes to demonstrate the effectiveness of homeless prevention, and by monitoring social determinants of health we’ll be able to more effectively intervene when additional assistance is most critical.  This grant will help people directly and inform scaling of demonstrated effective homeless prevention resources,” Anglea stated.

FTEHSD funders work together to promote an effective and efficient system of housing and services to help end homelessness in San Diego County. FTEHSD’s goal is to build a San Diego County network of funders committed to solving homelessness through leadership, education, and advocacy; strategic collaboration, alignment and focus of resources; and effective promotion and replication of evidence-based practices in our community.

“We are pleased to fund both activities that work to improve and enhance systems our region’s homeless response relies on, as well as making bets on innovations that are emerging. To end homelessness in our region, both approaches are needed,” said Amy Denhart, director of Funders Together to End Homelessness San Diego at San Diego Grantmakers.

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Want more? 

• To learn about FTEHSD and to consider joining us, visit here.
• Looking to support the homeless community and mitigate the effects of COVID-19? To help address the urgent needs of the most at-risk populations of homeless people, FTEHSD launched the San Diego Homeless Seniors COVID-19 Response Fund. To learn how you can support the fund, visit here.
• Looking for more context for California’s housing & homelessness crisis? Last month, Philanthropy California – an alliance of Northern California, Southern California, and San Diego Grantmakers – virtually convened over 600 funders from across California for a day dedicated to philanthropy’s role in strengthening our democracy and civic engagement during this unprecedented moment. Check out our Post-Policy Summit Blog Series of key learnings from the session on addressing homelessness in California here.