Key Initiatives

(2015 – 2019)

Catalyzing Bold Investments

With a strategic plan in place and some early successes using the Housing First
model, the coalition was ready to double down on efforts to end homelessness. But, even as these efforts ramped up, housing options were becoming even more scarce — especially those that were affordable to the community’s lowest-income residents. At the time, the California Housing Partnership estimated that more than 67,500 additional homes were needed to meet the needs of extremely low-income and very low-income residents across Santa Clara County. As a result, the coalition had to move aggressively to secure the funding, political will and partnership needed to scale its work.

Securing New Sources of Funding

With a new shared Community Plan in place, the coalition had a roadmap for moving forward. But it had not yet secured the funding necessary to really start investing in these strategies.

The first key piece of the puzzle came in 2016, when the County of Santa Clara proposed and secured approval for a $950 million affordable housing bond (known as Measure A) that created a large dedicated source of funding to build more deeply affordable housing. Other public entities would follow suit too – the Santa Clara County Housing Authority began allocating housing vouchers and other federal resources to the effort, and the City of San Jose aligned many of its existing resources, as well as a 2020 transfer tax (known as Measure E) behind this collective work – adding several hundreds of millions of additional private dollars. In addition, Destination: Home launched a years-long effort to raise private and philanthropic funding, ultimately bringing in more than $300 million in additional private funding.

Together, these key sources of funding would make it possible for the coalition to begin advancing its efforts at-scale.

Key Initiatives Launched During This Period

As these key sources of funding were secured, the coalition was able to launch several key strategies between 2015 and 2020 – all of which continue to this day and have served as the foundation for the community-wide effort to end homelessness

Ramping Up the Production of Deeply Affordable Housing

After the adoption of the Measure A housing bond in 2016, the coalition undertook a concerted strategy to ramp up production and development of deeply affordable housing in Santa Clara County – and particularly extremely low income and supportive housing units. Yet the voters’ stamp of approval was not enough; truly scaling up deeply affordable housing production also required aligning members throughout the coalition.

By coming together around this shared goal, the coalition has successfully launched more than 64 new housing developments with more than 7,000 affordable units over the past decade.

Launching a New Homelessness Prevention System

From the start, the coalition’s primary focus was to produce more affordable housing and get more people into those homes. But over time, it became clear that these efforts needed to be complemented by efforts to prevent more families from being pushed into homelessness in the first place. And helping families stay in their existing homes costs much less — both financially and in terms of suffering — than assisting people once they are pushed out of their homes. 

So, in 2017, the coalition brought a wide array of public, private and nonprofit partners together to launch a new Homelessness Prevention System. And over the next half-dozen years, this system would ultimately serve 20,000 people at risk of homelessness — more than 90% of whom remained stably housed — and become a key part of the local homelessness response.

Centering Lived Experience in Our Work

Too often, people with lived experience of homelessness are treated only as beneficiaries, rather than key constituents of, and advisors to, the system of care. As the model in Santa Clara County evolved, it was abundantly clear that voices of lived experience should be front and center and the coalition took intentional steps to center lived experience in its work.

Today, a half-dozen different decision-making bodies include dedicated seats for people with lived experience and, over the years, hundreds of millions of dollars in publicly-funded homelessness contracts have been vetted by people with lived experience.

Key Metrics from the 2015-2020 Community Plan

Thanks to the key efforts described above, and many other key initiatives, the coalition delivered many impressive results during the 2015-2020 Community Plan period:

Key Elements for Successful Coalition Building

“Coalition” is a deceptively simple word. Reams of research, case studies, even university courses are dedicated to the art of building a coalition, because forming a solid, sustained partnership around a common agenda is extremely hard work. What’s more, each coalition looks different—with varying stakeholders, priorities, power dynamics, and decision-making structures.

Collective impact starts from the assumption that working together is more effective than working alone. So how do you bring together groups with different perspectives, agendas, and resources and convince them to move in a shared direction? In this collective impact model, several elements were critical to building a functional coalition. No coalition is without conflict, but the elements below can help stakeholders align their priorities, build trusting relationships, and allocate resources for the greater good.

Sometimes if you lack clarity about the role your agency can play or can’t play, that starts creating friction points. What works for us is a constant communication loop.

Preston Prince, Executive Director of
Santa Clara County Housing Authority

I’m sitting in meetings next to billionaires, entrepreneurs, people with lived experience, and county leadership. That’s really unique for service providers, who are typically relegated to operational-level participation in the system.

Louis Chicoine, CEO of Abode Services

Moral Leadership

At the heart of this coalition is a goal to house the most in need people in the community. That requires unwavering commitment to prioritizing housing for people with the lowest incomes and highest needs —which is the most difficult, expensive, and impactful housing strategy. A combination of political will and moral leadership was key to building buy-in around this bold commitment, despite the costs and potential blowback.

Constant Communication

Ongoing communication among partners is necessary to share ideas, analyze gaps, identify resources, and move this important, but difficult work forward. Destination: Home was established with a mandate to convene diverse stakeholders and facilitate regular, ongoing communication among partners. In this coalition, key stakeholders – at all levels within an organization – meet regularly to foster collaboration, and representatives from across the system have seats on Destination: Home’s Board of Directors, where they help guide collective impact strategies. This type of regular communication between stakeholders has also built personal relationships grounded in trust—which is especially useful when conflict or disagreements occur.

Robust Data

In order to rally entities around a common agenda, you need to understand what’s currently working and what’s not. Early on, partners conducted a cost study that quantified spending on homeless support services and projected cost savings of building permanent supportive housing. Coalition partners also committed to utilizing and investing in the shared Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), regularly collecting, analyzing and reporting to inform and improve their collective efforts. Basing decisions on this type of robust data is critical to both securing buy-in and forging a shared path forward.

Transparency

Through the Community Plan to End Homelessness, coalition partners agreed on shared, outcome-based metrics. To measure progress, the County produces and shares reports based on data collected through HMIS. This transparent data collection and sharing ensures partners are more aligned about where to allocate resources.

Unified System

From developing the Community Plan to End Homelessness to launching new systems for homelessness prevention and data management, a major part of this coalition building has been to shift from a fragmented system to a unified one. Partners are agreed not only on five-year goals, but also on the roles that each plays in moving the system forward.

Aligning Funding for Results

In order to make meaningful progress, all partners in a coalition must be committed to putting some of their skin in the game in support of their shared goals. In this coalition, the collective work was catalyzed by the City of San Jose and County of Santa Clara both shifting dollars to implementing a Housing First approach and supporting housing solutions for the most at-risk residents. While modest in size, these initial funding commitments were key to pushing the broader ecosystem in a new direction, while also securing some early wins and building momentum. In fact, these early actions to align funding for greater impact set the table for securing and deploying approximately $2 billion in new public and private funding behind this collective effort.

Willingness to Broaden the Circle

As this coalition has evolved, it has benefited from the introduction of new partners. Stakeholders from the private sector, philanthropy, and those with lived experience of homelessness have strengthened the coalition with their unique perspectives and resources.