It’s hard to be a student if you don’t have a home.
That was the dilemma facing J.J. Chavez when he was accepted into the nursing program at Imperial Valley College in Imperial, California. His family doesn’t live far from the college, but the neighborhood where he was raised is rough, and it was increasingly untenable for J.J. to stay there. But the cost of an apartment was out of his financial reach.
Then J.J. learned about the cluster of tiny homes near the Imperial Valley College (IVC) campus. The Lotus Living Tiny Homes Project provides housing for 26 IVC students. The homes are snug, white buildings that each have a bed, a desk, a small kitchen, a bathroom and laundry machines, with a patio out front and a front gate for the entire community. J.J. describes his home as “cozy and very welcoming. I feel safe here,” he said. “Being here grounds me to focus on my academics, and motivates me to do my best.”
The Lotus Living Tiny Homes Project is one of 21 projects underwritten by Blue Shield of California’s $20 million contribution to California’s Homekey initiative. Gov. Gavin Newsom first introduced the program, then called Project Roomkey, in 2020, to provide housing in empty hotel and motel rooms for people experiencing homelessness. The pandemic pushed the program into high gear. Homekey is an expansion of the original Roomkey initiative, and it provides resources for state, regional and local entities to develop a range of housing options, including hotels, motels, apartments and tiny homes.
When Newsom introduced his housing initiative, he called on philanthropy and the private sector to step up, too, and Blue Shield of California (BSC) was among the first to respond with a $20 million investment. Kaiser Permanente provided $25 million and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provided an additional $1 million.
Perry Chen, BSC’s director of social impact, says helping to create housing for people experiencing homelessness aligns with the corporation’s mission: to address the many factors that contribute to an individual’s health. “People often think that promoting health just has to do with the overall healthcare system,” he said. “But we think about the broader social determinants of health: all the different elements that keep families healthy. As part of Blue Shield’s commitment to healthy families, doing what we can to eliminate homelessness makes a lot of sense.”
Beyond the doctor’s office
Blue Shield of California’s inclusive definition of what constitutes health is reflected in the work of its philanthropic arm, the Blue Shield of California Foundation (BSCF), which has expanded its reach far beyond the doctor’s office and the hospital room. BSCF supports domestic violence prevention and California’s Immigrant Resilience Fund; it is also funding programs to address the youth mental health crisis.
Providing secure housing is also a priority for the foundation. When the pandemic hit, for example, BSCF added its voice to the call for an eviction moratorium in Vallejo, California. Vallejo’s eviction moratorium was the first such measure to be enacted, and was later replicated in other cities around the country.
Blue Shield of California is funding a total of 21 housing projects around the state, including the LifeMoves supportive interim housing community in Mountain View. The LifeMoves community has 100 rooms for individuals and families, and provides services, including a case worker and access to mental healthcare, to help residents access benefits and plan their next steps. These kinds of wraparound services are an integral part of the Homekey approach. Students in the tiny homes at IVC have access to such services, as well, including tutoring support.
A number of funders are addressing homelessness today, as IP has reported, including the Ford Foundation, Harry and Jeannette Weinberg, Jeff Bezos’ Day 1 Families Fund and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, to name just a few. But as discussed in our State of American Philanthropy report on giving for housing and homelessness, many still cling to a narrow view of the problem: “A large share of philanthropy—and the public at large—still seems to operate according to the belief that homelessness is a consequence of personal choices rather than widespread systemic failure. This often results in palliative, episodic responses to housing or homelessness crises rather than the well-coordinated, cross-sectoral, intersectional and systematic approach required.”
Magic recipe
It is still early days, but Homekey seems like it could be an effective approach. In a recent Politico article titled “California’s ‘Magic Recipe’ for Reducing Homelessness,” David Grunwald, an executive at a housing organization that has contracts with Homekey, said, “I’ve been doing housing and homeless work since 1989, and it’s the first strategy I’ve seen that has promise to scale up in a way that makes a difference.”
At the same time, the initiative has run into glitches and roadblocks, many of them outlined in a recent San Jose Mercury News piece, including funding gaps, bureaucratic red tape and renovation delays.
Few social issues are as stubborn and complicated as homelessness, and one single program or approach is not going to solve it. Many complex factors—including lack of affordable housing, income inequality, lack of access to physical and mental healthcare and systemic racism—contribute to homelessness, and addressing these issues will take time, resources and commitment. Still, public-private partnerships like Homekey, with support from funders like Blue Shield of California, provide an example of where the sector’s “housing first” approach is making a difference—glitches and all.
The work of Homekey and similar programs represents just a fraction of what needs to be done, of course, but the vastness of the problem can make it easy to overlook how much of an impact such programs can have on a single life.
For J.J. Chavez, for example, the opportunity to move into his own home has been transformative. He loves his classes, and has zeroed in on dermatology as the area of nursing he wants to pursue. Nursing school is challenging and stressful—he and his fellow students compare it to a tour of duty in the army—and he doesn’t think he would have been able to keep his grades up without a safe and quiet place to call home. “I wouldn’t have been able to stick through nursing school without it,” he said.
Note: this story has been updated to reflect that support for Homekey was from Blue Shield of Calfornia, not the Blue Shield of California Foundation.