SSF Awarded $5 Million by Bezos Day 1 Family Fund Grant!

Sacramento Steps Forward Receives $5 Million Bezos Day 1 Families Fund Grant to Help End Family Homelessness in Sacramento

Sacramento Steps Forward (SSF) has been selected as a 2021 Bezos Day 1 Families Fund award recipient! Launched in 2018 by Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos, this fund was set up to support organizations that help homeless families to ensure that no child sleeps outside. We are proud to be among the 32 organizations across the county to be recognized by the fund’s independent advisory group of homelessness experts. We plan to use this generous $5 million investment over the next five years to advance systems-level approaches to gather real-time data to monitor and identify families at risk of and experiencing homelessness, quickly divert families and rapidly rehouse families experiencing homelessness, and focus on best practice approaches to identify and address racial disparities.

The majority of the funds – $4.5 million – will be regranted by SSF to our nonprofit partners to support their work helping homeless families directly. The remainder $500,000 will go towards family-focused systems-level initiatives and grant administration.

These funds will enable Sacramento to establish a family-focused leadership group to develop a shared vision and unified approach toward system improvements. We envision this collaborative leadership group to include our government agency partners, education/school district partners, homeless service providers, as well as persons with lived experience.

We are especially grateful for the Day 1 Families Fund’s support, which will allow the Sacramento region to double down on our community’s work to serve and provide stability for families in our community. This new source of funding is a welcome addition to our tools and resources to tackle family homelessness.

To learn more about how these funds will be used, check back here for updates!

Links:

Press Release

Award Announcement – November 17, 2021

SSF Award Announcement

Day 1 Families Fund webpage

Check this page for new information and updates. Updated: Nov. 17th, 2021