LifeMoves Issues $250M “Call to Action” to Silicon Valley
LifeMoves, Silicon Valley’s largest provider of interim housing and supportive services for those experiencing homelessness, is proud to announce the opening of LifeMoves Mountain View, an innovative, modular solution to provide interim supportive housing for individuals and families. LifeMoves Mountain View was made possible by the State of California’s Homekey program, the City of Mountain View, the County of Santa Clara, Google, LinkedIn, and other philanthropic donors.
Homelessness was already a pervasive and increasingly challenging situation in Silicon Valley. Covid has made it devastating. Taking an innovative and entrepreneurial approach to this urgent problem, LifeMoves partnered with the City of Mountain View and iconic Silicon Valley companies Google and LinkedIn on an innovative approach to providing interim supportive housing to the unhoused. LifeMoves Mountain View, a 100 unit modular interim housing facility, was built and brought into service in 6 months, at a fraction of the cost of new housing units. The site also dedicates 30% of its square footage to space for supportive services and meeting rooms, allowing LifeMoves to provide its clients case management, health care, counseling, life skills, employment and housing search services. LifeMoves programs are intensively provided over 90-120 days, allowing clients to attain stability, build life skills and savings before exiting to stable housing. With this new site, LifeMoves has the capacity to serve 50+% of the current homeless population in Mountain View over the next year.
“We are so grateful to Governor Newsom for support through Homekey funding, to Mayor Ellen Kamei and the entire City Council and staff of Mountain View, to the County of Santa Clara and to Google and LinkedIn for their immense support to build this needed facility. State, city, county and corporate leaders, along with philanthropic LifeMoves donors, brought this innovative project to life in an amazingly rapid and cooperative way,” stated LifeMoves CEO Aubrey Merriman. “Together, we have demonstrated that where there is the will, there is a way to work together quickly to provide safe, clean interim housing for our unhoused friends, families and neighbors. Visionary leadership is now being harnessed to solve some of our community’s most pressing issues and LifeMoves is so proud to be a part of the solution.”
“LifeMoves Mountain View is a great example of what can happen when state government, local government, corporations, non-profits and philanthropy work together to create innovative solutions to complex issues facing society,” stated California Governor Gavin Newsom. “It is appropriate that this project is being done in Silicon Valley, a center of global innovation, where we have so much talent and so many great thinkers. I’m so proud to be a Californian when I see projects like this where we’ve used creative solutions to help solve problems like housing and homelessness in an innovative and entrepreneurial way. The Homekey program helps our fellow citizens in need and we should all be proud of what we are able to accomplish when we work together.”
LifeMoves CEO Aubrey Merriman: “Our new Mountain View site is also a tool in the fight for equity and social justice. We know that the pandemic has had a disparate impact on communities of color. As we grow our capacity to serve neighbors made homeless in the pandemic, our pandemic response is also an equity response. Even before the pandemic, we know that communities of color were over-represented in the population experiencing homelessness. As we scale our impact to serve those people most impacted, our housing solution is also an equity solution. This site will help us move more people from homelessness to housing and also help us to build a more just and inclusive community.”
CALL TO ACTION
“With 10 more of these modular, supportive interim housing locations throughout Silicon Valley, we can serve nearly 20,000 people over the next 5 years. That is the scale needed to significantly impact homelessness in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, and LifeMoves is committed to doing its part to build and operate these sites. We need philanthropic support, we need land, we need city and county support, we need to involve our peer service providers,” stated Joe Stockwell, Chair of the Board, LifeMoves.
“We have the programs, we have the experience, we have the will. Each of these sites will cost $25M to build and operate for 5 years and can be implemented within 6 months with city and county leadership, core public funding, and visionary commitment from our business and philanthropic communities. This $250M call to action by LifeMoves is a first step consistent with the larger regional action plan recently announced by AllHome and with the Big City Mayors’ recent call for State funding to combat homelessness. LifeMoves is the largest provider of interim housing services in Silicon Valley and we are raising our hand to lead in this effort.”
Please join us in helping us take the necessary steps to eradicate homelessness in our communities. The need is so great, we need your help. Please contact Katherine Finnigan, Chief Development Officer at LifeMoves (kfinnigan@lifemoves.org) if you would like to help fund these projects. Contact Joanne Price, VP Real Estate at LifeMoves (jprice@lifemoves.org) if you are a government official and would like to site one of these innovative, interim housing solutions in your city. www.lifemoves.org
