Model and Strategy
The Livelihood Project will fundamentally change the way the city’s employment and homeless systems interact to empower homeless adults in sustaining housing and jobs. It leverages a key partnership with the SF Department of Homelessness & Supportive Housing (HSH), which is funding subsidies enabling 40 unhoused single adults to lease market-rate rental units for 2 years, after which they must self-support. With HSH support, ECS will provide these 40 men and women with essential housing navigation support, helping them through application and leasing, resolving barriers like poor credit, and supporting them in retaining housing.
We invite Battery Powered to multiply the impact of this work funded by HSH by helping us build a platform of programs to increase participants’ employability and income. Your grant will fund development of a transformative slate of system cross-coordinating including training and employment opportunities, placement assistance, financial literacy training, and job retention supports. The Project builds the evidence base that alignment between homeless and workforce systems yields better results than independent actions by either system. By serving as a catalyst for further alignment between those systems, the Project will help ensure sustained housing for many more unhoused adults.
Impact
The Livelihood Project assists single adults experiencing homelessness who, with the right employment and housing stabilization supports, can increase their job earnings and maintain their housing in the market-rate housing rental market.
ECS is in a unique position as the lead Adult Coordinated Entry provider in SF to impact systems change and scale the model, making homelessness a rare and brief event for thousands of low-income people. The Project builds employment assessment into Coordinated Entry, which is the first entry into the City-wide homeless system and in this way achieves scale. The Project’s metrics will build the evidence base enabling ECS to scale and disseminate the model.
HSH has expressed commitment to the model and acknowledged our model’s potential impact on HSH’s other Rapid Re-Housing (RRH) commitments: the public-private partnership (Rising Up) that provides 500 RRH slots for homeless youth and approximately 500 RRH subsidies for homeless families, spread among 5 providers.
In the short term, the project will achieve housing stability for 40 unhoused single adults. In just 2 years’ time, the rapid rehousing subsidy will enable them to maintain market rate housing, and the employment supports will enable them to maintain that housing after the subsidy ends because they will have increased their employability and their earned income. Qualitative impact includes increased sense of worth, independence & other benefits derived from being housed, working and earning income.
Leadership
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Beth Stokes
Executive Director
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Jason Pruett
Project Lead