A national network of funders supporting strategic, innovative, and effective solutions to homelessness

Public-Private Partnerships

Public-Private Collaborations to Prevent and End Homelessness

No one sector alone can prevent and end homelessness: it takes the dedication and commitment from entities across the sector coming together with common goals. At Funders Together, we firmly believe in the power of public-private partnerships and its effects on preventing and ending homelessness and promoting this model of collaboration is a priority.

These partnerships are thriving in communities across the country and achieving impressive and necessary results. If you are part of a public-private partnership that is not listed here, please contact us with information on the partnership so we can make sure to add to this page.

 

Arizona: Maricopa County

Valley of the Sun United Way has been deeply involved in the county’s CoC which has paved the way for critical partnerships between it and Arizona Department of Housing, Maricopa County Human Services and the Arizona Department of Veterans’ Services. Through these partnerships, a pilot program started in Tempe with a goal of 1,000 units of permanent supportive housing for the chronically homeless. Out of those 1,000 units, 790 units are either online or in development with 25% of those units dedicated to veterans.

 

California: Los Angeles

The Funders Together to End Homelessness – Los Angeles chapter has more than thirty funder members who meet quarterly to learn about and discuss new solutions to homelessness in LA County.  Many of these members are also part of Los Angeles County’s Home For Good Funders Collaborative, led by the local United Way. Between 2012 and 2017 the Funders Collaborative have committed over $33.5 million in philanthropic investment, which has leveraged over $1 billion in public and philanthropic resources toward permanent solutions to homelessness in Los Angeles County.

 

California: Orange County

Launched in 2014 by United Way Orange County, the FACE 2024 campaign is a 10-year community-wide strategy to create a positive future for the next generation of Orange County residents. The plan focuses on long-term solutions to the most critical challenges confronting Orange County children and families. OCUW created a housing coalition with five key partners skilled at addressing homeless issues in the community. As a result:

  • 337 individuals were placed into permanent housing through Rapid Rehousing and provided with education and services to prevent future homelessness.
  • 38 families on the brink of homelessness received financial coaching from SparkPoint OC in Schools and other services to remain housed, in partnership with the Seimer Institute for Family Stability and JP Morgan Chase. SparkPoint in Schools is one example of a new initiative.
  • 38 families were redirected into temporary shelter from the winter armory emergency shelter and received counseling and financial literacy training so they could successfully transition into permanent housing.

 

California: San Diego

In San Diego, Funders Together San Diego, group of funders, worked with the San Diego Housing Commission and was able to leverage $240,000 into $10 million of public funding to support the operational expense of to create permanent supportive and convert existing transitional housing.

 

California: San Francisco

The Chronic Homelessness Initiative, powered by Tipping Point Community, is the largest private investment to address homelessness in San Francisco’s history. On any given night, 2,100 people experience chronic homelessness in San Francisco. Working with government and non-profit service providers, the initiative aims to cut chronic homelessness in half by 2022.

Connecticut

Reaching Home Campaign is the first statewide campaign aimed at ending chronic homelessness through an increase of supportive housing units. The Campaign is led by a group of over 130 advocacy organizations, government agencies (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Connecticut Departments of Housing, Children and Families, Education, Public Health, Labor, Mental Health and Addiction Services, Social Services, and Veterans’ Affairs), community providers, housing developers, and foundations, and is coordinated by the Trust’s grantee partner, the Partnership for Strong Communities. To date, the Reaching Home Campaign has:

  • Advocated for and secured over $300 million in state funding for programs to end homelessness and to create supportive and affordable housing.
  • Conducted the state’s first study of youth experiencing homelessness and released the Opening Doors for Youth plan
  • Ended homelessness among Veterans.
  • Launched Secure Jobs, a pilot program to connect families receiving rapid rehousing with employment supports.
  • Implemented a successful pilot that identifies and connects frequent users of emergency departments at hospitals to housing and supportive services.

 

District of Columbia

The Partnership to End Homelessness, led by the Greater Washington Community Foundation and the District Government’s Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH), brings together the public and private sectors to advance effective and innovative solutions to ensure homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring in DC.

 

Florida

The Miami-Dade Youth Homelessness Initiative (YHI) is a community-wide, multi-sector effort to create a locally designed, comprehensive system of care to prevent and address youth homelessness in Miami-Dade County. Over 50 partners are involved in the initiative including government entities, foundations, non-profits, and direct service providers. In the summer of 2016, YHI launched its Strategic Plan with aggressive goals to address and solve youth homelessness in the Miami-Dade area.

 

Minnesota

Heading Home Minnesota (HHM) is a coordinated public-private partnership to end homelessness in Minnesota. HHM is the umbrella for the new Heading Home: Minnesota’s Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness and all local plans to end homelessness. Eight counties (Anoka, Hennepin, Olmsted, Ramsey, Saint Louis, Scott-Carver, and Steele), six regions of the state (Northeast, Northwest, West Central, Central, Southeast, and Southwest) and seven tribal nations (Bois Forte, Fond du Lac, Grand Portage, Leech Lake, Mille Lacs, Red Lake, and White Earth) have developed and are implementing local plans to end homelessness in their communities.

Partners involved include the Heading Home Minnesota Funders Collaborative from the private sector, along with the Minnesota Interagency Council on Homelessness, and the Heading Home Minnesota Coordinators Council, both from the public sector.

 

Massachusetts

An initiative in Massachusetts called Secure Jobs quickly moves individuals in families out of homelessness and connects them with opportunities to improve their economic wellbeing. The initiative had an initial investment of $1.5 million from the Paul and Phyllis Fireman Charitable Trust with an additional $600,000 public-private leverage to support the one-year demonstration. This one-year effort grew from 5 to 7 regions across the state and is currently being replicated in Connecticut.

 

Ohio: Cleveland

A Place 4 Me is a cross-sector partnership initiative guided by 30 public and private partners to prevent and end homelessness among young adults age 15 to 24 in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. A Place 4 Me is led by a backbone agency/intermediary – the YWCA Greater Cleveland – and governed by a broader steering committee of: the Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services; the Cuyahoga County Office of Homeless Services (which manages the Continuum of Care); FrontLine Services (the county’s largest trauma-informed provider of case management services to the homeless population); the Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland; and the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative. A Place 4 Me launched an A Way Home America 100-Day Challenge with a goal of housing 100 youths in 100 days. Through this public-private partnership, 103 young people were housed by the end of the challenge.

 

Pennsylvania: Montgomery County

In 2014, a public-private partnership called Your Way Home Montgomery County was launched to address the issue of homelessness in the community. The organizational structure of YWH provides a single umbrella for county government, philanthropy, providers and other community stakeholders to come together and work as one aligned system addressing the needs of those experiencing homelessness. In 2016, impacts of this partnership are evident in the results seen:

  • Of 351 families that were provided diversion services, 73% were diverted from homelessness shelters
  • The percentage of families moving from shelter directly to permanent housing increased from 56% to 70%, while the percentage of individuals increased from 46% to 50%.
  • Only 4% of those who are moving from rapid re-housing to permanent supportive housing have fallen back into homelessness.

 

Texas: Austin

Austin was another A Way Home America 100-Day Challenge community participant. Through A Way Home Austin, essential public-private partnerships were formed that included Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, LifeWorks, Department of Family and Protective Services, Austin Travis County Integral Care, Salvation Army, Caritas, FrontSteps, City of Austin, Travis County, Austin Opportunity Youth Collaborative, Housing Authority of the City of Austin, Safe Alliance, AISD, APD, Restore Strategies, and many others. The effort set a goal of housing 50 youth in 100 days and exceeded the goal by housing 53 young people.

 

Texas: Houston

In Houston, Funders Together members are part of The Way Home, a collaborative made up of private-public partnerships utilizing community-wide strategies to end and prevent homelessness. The 2016 Point-In-Time Count showed The Way Home continuing a five-year trend in reducing homelessness - a 57% decrease since 2011.

 

Washington State: King County

In King County, The Raikes Foundation spearheaded a collaboration of private and public funders who are focused on preventing and ending youth homelessness. Through this collaboration, almost $5 million in private-public funds have been dedicated to the cause.

In the counties surrounding Seattle, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works with government and nonprofit partners to make homelessness rare, brief and one-time. Since its conception in 2005, this partnership, All Home, has been instrumental in creating 8,337 units of permanent housing of which 85% of the people housed were stabilized there for almost two years.

 

We also believe that funders have the opportunity to affect great change by working in collaboration with other funders. See our Homelessness Funders Collaborative page to see if there is an opportunity to connect with funders in your areas.

We joined Funders Together because we believe in the power of philanthropy to play a major role in ending homelessness, and we know we have much to learn from funders across the country.

-Christine Marge, Director of Housing and Financial Stability at United Way of Greater Los Angeles

I am thankful for the local partnerships here in the Pacific Northwest that we’ve been able to create and nurture thanks to the work of Funders Together. Having so many of the right players at the table makes our conversations – and all of our efforts – all the richer and more effective.

-David Wertheimer, Deputy Director at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

-President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964 State of the Union Address

Funders Together has given me a platform to engage the other funders in my community. Our local funding community has improved greatly to support housing first models and align of resources towards ending homelessness.

-Leslie Strnisha, Vice President at Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland

Our family foundation convenes local funders and key community stakeholders around strategies to end homelessness in Houston. Funders Together members have been invaluable mentors to us in this effort, traveling to our community to share their expertise and examples of best practices from around the nation.

-Nancy Frees Fountain, Managing Director at The Frees Foundation


Sign in with Facebook, Twitter or email.
X

Become a Member

Only members have access to some of the resources we list on this page. Feel free to explore the Funder Toolkit and see what we have to offer, but you may not be able to access some of the resources without signing up for membership.

When you join Funders Together, you also gain access to: educational programming, national learning communities, funder-focused tools and resources, networking opportunities, and more. Read about membership here.

Read how funders can end homelessness.

Join Now
Already a member? Sign in.