A Family Housing has been helping homeless people for more than three decades. The Los Angeles organization buys motels and hotels and converts them into apartments that provide both temporary and permanent housing. It also offers a wide range of support services to help vulnerable people gain access to food, mental and physical health care, and other assistance that helps them avoid homelessness.
When the pandemic struck last March, LA Family Housing officials had to scramble to change how it carries out its work and persuades donors to support the organization. Some of the new approaches have worked so well that the nonprofit plans to make the changes permanent, both in its programs and in fundraising.
“We’ve found not just new ways of providing services, but we’ve increased our assets enormously in these last 15 months,” says Stephanie Klasky-Gamer, LA Family Housing’s CEO. “How we reach out to the philanthropic community to support that level of expansion is a whole other way that we’ve changed.”
When she talks about increasing assets, Klasky-Gamer is referring to the group’s participation last year in two California state pandemic-relief programs aimed at getting people who are homeless into stable housing. Project Roomkey provided emergency money in the early weeks of the pandemic so that groups like Klasky-Gamer’s could lease motel and hotel rooms to provide temporary housing to people experiencing homelessness, a group that faced a high risk of contracting Covid-19.
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Project Homekey, the second iteration of that effort, provided $800 million in grants to local governments and housing agencies to buy motels and other facilities and deed them to nonprofits like LA Family Housing, which then converted the buildings into permanent housing and managed them. Project Homekey is creating 6,000 new such units across the state, according to Gustavo Velasquez, director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development, and it’s likely there will be another round of funding for the project, he says.
LA Family Housing opened its first Roomkey site on March 27 and by April 20 had moved 700 people into the nonprofit’s by then five Project Roomkey sites.
When Project Homekey was launched several months later, LA Family Housing acquired four properties from government agencies, which the group is transforming into 250 new permanent apartments. Klasky-Gamer says she hired about 180 new staff members last year to keep up with all the work associated with renovating the new properties. Although the city paid for the new hires, Klasky-Gamer must raise money to renovate three of the four buildings it acquired, in addition to what she usually raises to support the services her group provides.
The charity’s 2021 budget is about $75 million, says Klasky-Gamer. Around $60 million of the budget comes from government and public contracts, and another $9 million comes from rents from the organization’s apartment buildings and fees it earns. She and her team must raise about $6 million to fill out the budget, plus an additional $19 million to convert three of the four new buildings to permanent housing. (The fourth building is being converted with other funds.) Last year, the nonprofit raised a total of $9.5 million.
Klasky-Gamer says the need to social distance during the pandemic meant that taking big donors on tours of the charity’s housing sites was out of the question. So were one-on-one meetings with donors. She instead turned to online platforms. Switching to virtual meetings provided an extra benefit to Klasky-Gamer and her donors that is especially important in Los Angeles: saving them hours because neither party had to battle the city’s notorious traffic to meet in person.
Virtual meetings save both staff and donors hours they would have spent fighting the city’s notorious traffic.
“If it takes me an hour to drive to go have one donor lunch, that’s a four-hour endeavor,” says Klasky-Gamer. “If I want to see people and keep them up-to-date or if they don’t want to drive to me, then we just do it over Zoom.”
While Klasky-Gamer is getting back to in-person meetings, she is confident online ones will continue to be popular with donors. She has also experimented with other forms of digital communication. For example, last year she kept donors up-to-date on the nonprofit’s work by having a staff member videotape her walking through new housing sites to show donors how renovations were progressing.
In the videos, she introduced supporters to some of the group’s clients who had made homes in the new units and showed them how the nonprofit was meeting pandemic safety protocols. The video segments were a safe, easy way for Klasky-Gamer to “walk” donors through properties across Los Angeles that they might never have visited on their own. It’s something she intends to keep doing for donors who can’t find the time for in-person tours and to reach more supporters at once.
Klasky-Gamer and her staff also recruited young online “influencers” and entertainers to be part of its new LA Family Housing Young Hollywood Action Committee. The goal was to bolster the organization’s social-media presence. Committee members such as the drag performer Honey Davenport, Instagram model Andy Lalwani, and actress Chrissie Fit helped the charity triple its followers on social media.
The celebrities tell their social-media followers about LA Family Housing’s work — sometimes in novel ways. For example, one of the committee members, actress Troian Bellisario, posted a video on her Instagram page that shows her making one of the various “welcome home” baskets — in this case a hygiene kit of toiletries — that the charity gives clients when they enter permanent housing. She talked about what to include in the baskets, provided a link to show how to schedule a drop-off of a basket or other donation, and why the starter kits are so important.
“All of a sudden, we started receiving all these welcome-home baskets and we started seeing all of these posts of people saying support LA Family Housing,” Klasky-Gamer says. “Extending our reach to people who could broaden the audience learning about our work has helped us with our in-kind and advocacy.”
