Giving Compass' Take:

• Jackie Downing shares the resilience strategies and work of the Bay Area Homelessness Funders Network, a group of philanthropic leaders that collaborate to address homelessness in the Bay Area. 

• What practices are helping funders adapt during COVID-19 successfully? How are you pivoting funding strategies to meet community needs? 

• Read how philanthropists are adapting to support community action during the pandemic. 

These past months, we've found ourselves returning to the same question: are our plans still serving their purpose, or is there a greater opportunity made possible by the crises in which we find ourselves?

We asked NCG's board, staff, and membership to weigh-in on how they're balancing this question. Jackie Downing of Crankstart joins us to share more about the launch of NCG's newest network, the Bay Area Homelessness Funders Network, and how she's thinking about persistence and adaptivity right now.  

Background and Impetus for Creating a Bay Area Homelessness Funders Network

In February, a joint conference between the National Alliance to End Homelessness and Funders Together to End Homelessness drew funders from across the Bay Area together to discuss the rapid growth of homelessness in the Bay Area and the need for greater funder collaboration and philanthropic leadership on this issue. The group recognized the need to center racial equity, to work at the intersection of health, housing, and income needs, and to take a regional approach that would help each of us break out of our issue and geographic silos to finally tackle homelessness at scale.

What are you hearing from the region’s philanthropy and our broader partner-community on what matters most right now?

What matters most to our foundation and our community partners is ensuring that all human beings have the same fundamental things: food, water, shelter, health, safety, education and economic opportunity, and freedom. COVID-19, the recession, and the demise of democracy threaten these fundamentals, especially for Black, Brown, and other historically marginalized communities. What we hear most frequently from our grantees and other allies is the importance of responding quickly to immediate needs and challenges while never losing sight of our bigger goal to upend systemic inequality and ensure that these fundamentals are truly guaranteed for everyone.

Read the full article about Bay Area Homelessness Funders Network at Northern California Grantmakers