Nonprofit pledges $100 million to help San Francisco’s homeless

21 Jun Nonprofit pledges $100 million to help San Francisco’s homeless

Local nonprofit Tipping Point Community has pledged $100 million to cut the city’s chronically homeless population in half by 2021, the largest donation ever of its kind in San Francisco.

Tipping Point told the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday that its official launch date for the new program the money will support is July 1, but $2 million has already been issued to support other aspects of the city’s homeless housing programs.

The program hopes to boost the number of people who move out of S.F.’s supportive housing network from 800 annually to 1,000 annually.

“We’re seeing too many people on the street suffering. … It’s time we draw a line in the sand,” Daniel Lurie, Tipping Point’s founder and chief executive officer, told the paper. “Things have to change. It’s no secret what needs to be done. We want to build on the great work that has happened at the city level and expand on innovative solutions.”

San Francisco spends around $265 million a year attempting to address homelessness, a cost which is spread out through a constellation of programs that include counseling, policing, housing and healthcare.

Lurie estimates that the city has about 2,000 chronically homeless residents, a population which Mayor Ed Less has been attempting to lower for years.

“Lee has been exhorting philanthropists to help with the city’s homeless problem ever since a donor gave the city $3 million in 2015 to open its inaugural Navigation Center, the first shelter of its kind in the nation to let occupants bring in partners, all their belongings and their pets around the clock while counselors direct them toward long-term housing,” the paper reports.

“Since then, Salesforce head Marc Benioff and others have donated a total of $30 million to try to end family homelessness by 2019. But nothing in the city’s history, for homelessness, has been as big as Tipping Point’s promised contribution.”

During his tenure, Lee has boosted the number of permanent supportive housing units by 38 percent and the amount of shelter beds by 25 percent. Tipping Point said this week that will spread its $100 million across a variety of programs, including homeless housing.

“Tipping Point’s money will also be pointed at improving foster care, mental health, criminal justice release and other programs designed to keep people from skidding to the streets,” the paper reports. “The charity will pay for two outside specialists to help Kositsky’s department assemble a data system to track which services homeless people use. That’s a key step in making sure people get counseling and housing without being ping-ponged between programs.”

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