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

Our Mission, Vision, and Values

Our Mission

Funders Together to End Homelessness will mobilize its members to utilize the voice, influence, and expertise of philanthropy in ways that will advance lasting solutions to ending homelessness, including addressing its underlying causes like structural and racial inequities, and helping create policies and systems that center people with lived expertise.

 

Our Vision

Because of the contributions from Funders Together to End Homelessness to this work, homelessness is a rare, short-term, and one-time event, and housing and services opportunities are not conditioned by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other personal characteristics.

Learn more about our why Funders Together has and will use a racial equity lens to support our members and the philanthropic sector to shift its practice, policy and grantmaking actions and how we will foster greater diversity, equity, and inclusion within FTEH as an organization

 

Our Value

Funders Together to End Homelessness provides critical resources, learning and networking opportunities to our members to increase their knowledge, capacity, and effectiveness in their individual and collective work to prevent and end homelessness. We act as a vehicle for members to be part of a broader movement and bring greater financial and intellectual resources to the work to end homelessness.

Funders Together brings philanthropy together around best practices and innovation to ensure investments are maximized as funders in communities around the United States work towards solutions to prevent and end homelessness.

Funders Together to End Homelessness:

  • Encourages and supports our members in risk taking and learning faster together.
  • Inspires by connecting members doing critical work across the United States to each other as well as members with a local focus to national efforts.
  • Highlights available opportunities for funders to be part of policy change and bring the collective philanthropic voice to advocacy at both the local and national level.
  • Provides tailored learning that allows philanthropy to consider the role in best practices and emerging topics around preventing and ending homelessness.

 

Our Point of View

  • We believe moving people into permanent housing through proven best practices is critical to ensuring homelessness is rare, brief, and one-time.
  • It is essential that philanthropy work in a public-private partnership model identifying where funds can be leveraged and spur innovation and collaboration.
  • In order to effect lasting change, it is critical for communities to take a systems change approach to the work of preventing and ending homelessness.
  • Recognizing policy change and prioritizing public resources is critical to our work and we believe funders should engage in and fund advocacy efforts at the local and national level.  
  • Historic and current structural racism contribute to homelessness and housing insecurity, therefore, it is critical philanthropy prioritize grantmaking with a racial equity lens and work with grantee partners to address structural inequities. 
  • We encourage a grantee-centered approach and embedding lived experience in all aspects of our members’ work to prevent and end homelessness.

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


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