Home For Good Funders Collaborative Provides Over $75M in Funds

LOS ANGELES, March 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Private and public funders in Los Angeles County have formed a Collaborative that released a Request for Proposals (RFP) representing over $75 million in public and private resources today. The Home For Good Funders Collaborative is an unprecedented partnership of 18 public and private funders, formed in October 2011 to create more permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless people.

Collaborative funding will support chronically homeless people in moving off the streets and obtaining the services they need to stay housed.  The Home For Good Funders Collaborative will award funds to qualified applicants in less than six months, and the Collaborative process will help streamline housing creation.

The Collaborative came together in order to leverage funding in a time of dwindling resources.  Funders Collaboratives that fund permanent supportive housing, successful in communities like Seattle and Denver, enable public and private funders to layer and blend funding streams in order to maximize the impact of their dollars.  The Collaborative method also enables nonprofits to identify and apply for multiple funding streams through a single application process.

The Collaborative was seeded by a $1 million gift from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, a challenge grant with a 4:1 match requirement to the private sector.  In total, private funders will contribute $5 million in funds in this first year, and public funders will distribute $37 million in resources through the RFP and will contribute an additional $33 million in resources following the grant awards in June 2012.  

Included in the public resources are a new set aside of 500 tenant-based vouchers over two years from the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), 100 tenant-based vouchers over two years from the Housing Authority of the County of Los Angeles (HACoLA), $10 million in resources from the Los Angeles Housing Department to support new development of permanent supportive housing, $3.25 million in services supports from L.A. County Departments, and 28 project-based vouchers from the City of Pasadena for new development.

The following funders are contributing resources to the Collaborative:

The Home For Good Funders Collaborative was formed in alignment with the Home For Good blueprint, a 5-year plan in Los Angeles County to end chronic and veteran homelessness by 2016.  The plan, in its second year of implementation, has been highly successful in bringing together diverse stakeholders around the common goal of ending chronic and veteran homelessness in the region, creating powerful partnerships and efficiencies that have already helped over 3,000 veterans and chronically homeless people out of homelessness. Over 100 public sector, nonprofit, faith, and philanthropic leaders have signed on to Home For Good.

The Collaborative is managed by United Way of Greater Los Angeles. 

More information about Home For Good can be found at www.homeforgoodla.org.

SOURCE Home For Good