A person paints on a tent during a demonstration against the rise in encampment sweeps in front of City Hall in San Francisco on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024. Tipping Point Community, which Mayor Daniel Lurie founded before entering City Hall, will support a pilot program aimed at stemming a surge in family homelessness. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)
The nonprofit that San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie founded before entering City Hall is now investing millions of dollars to help the city combat homelessness, a key issue on which the mayor has vowed to make progress.
Tipping Point Community on Tuesday announced it will donate $11 million to support a pilot program aimed at preventing family homelessness, which surged by 94% in San Francisco last year, according to the latest point-in-time count of the city’s homeless population.
“This investment assists families in crisis today while we develop and scale a model to support families in need for decades to come,” Lurie said in a statement. “Creating lasting change in San Francisco requires all hands on deck, and I’m proud to launch this critical public-private partnership with Tipping Point.”
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The 18-month pilot program will run through June 2026 and will fund direct assistance to approximately 1,500 households to support back rent and other living expenses for families at risk of losing their housing. The money will also be used to create a database of the city’s homelessness prevention efforts in an attempt to streamline the city’s network of services, which can be a complicated maze for families seeking support.
“Perhaps there’s a family member with undiagnosed mental health issues, and that is one of the issues that is putting the family’s housing at risk. These dollars can help pay for health services for the family so that they can stay housed,” Tipping Point CEO Sam Cobbs said. “Just about anything that a family needs to stay housed and to improve, increase their income, these dollars will be used to do that.”
Shelter beds are set up in an auditorium at Buena Vista Horace Mann Community School on June 10, 2024, which operates as one of San Francisco’s largest homeless shelters. The nonprofit Dolores Street Community Services runs the shelter after hours and during the summer when school is not in session for San Francisco Unified School District students and their families. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
Lurie vowed on the campaign trail to build 1,500 shelter beds and more affordable housing to significantly reduce homelessness, something many of his predecessors also attempted and struggled to achieve.
One of his first attempts to steer the homelessness response was a law expanding his powers as mayor to more quickly hire and contract services related to homelessness as well as the drug crisis. The Board of Supervisors passed it last month.
That ordinance also makes it easier for the city to solicit and receive private donations — known as behested payments — for such efforts. However, the mayor did not request the Tipping Point funding, according to Cobbs, who said it is not directly tied to his legislative efforts to cut red tape.
“The donation is going directly to the nonprofits working on these issues; none of the dollars are going directly to the city,” Cobbs said, noting that all five of the nonprofits that will receive funds have contracts with the city. “Family homelessness is the fastest growing part of the homeless population in San Francisco, and this is really meant to prevent that from happening.”
Still, the donation has raised eyebrows by some government ethics watchdogs.
Sean McMorris, the transparency, ethics and accountability program manager at California Common Cause, said there’s “potentially a slippery slope” around conflict of interest laws if donors close to Lurie see Tipping Point Community as a conduit for footing the city’s bills for contracts and services.
“Lurie founded this organization and has recused himself; however, you can’t discount the fact that they are giving millions of dollars now after learning that Lurie wanted private enterprises to come in and help solve the homelessness problem,” McMorris said. “I hope the program is successful, but it does raise some new concerns for me.”
Funding from Tipping Point will go toward five nonprofits working on homelessness prevention and services: Compass Family Services, APA Family Support Services, Booker T. Community Service Center, Mission Neighborhood Centers and Mission Economic Development Agency.
Staff at Compass Family Services pose for a portrait outside of the organization in San Francisco on Sept. 18, 2022. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
Tipping Point Community will evaluate the results of the program after it concludes.
“For at-risk families in San Francisco, successfully preventing homelessness requires more than just financial support,” Compass Family Services CEO Erica Kisch said in a statement. “It requires childcare, stable employment, and ongoing wraparound support.”
The $11 million donation is part of a broader $100 million fundraising initiative to address San Francisco homelessness that the Tipping Point Community started in 2017 when Lurie was still CEO. The organization donated $50 million to a program with similar goals in 2018.
Tipping Point is still shy of meeting its $100 million goal, according to Cobbs. Meanwhile, the rate of family homelessness has increased in San Francisco in recent years, especially after the pandemic hit when many families were already struggling to afford the city’s high cost of living and lost employment.
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