Partners for HOME, the homeless response agency serving the City of Atlanta, today announced that it has received a $2.5 million grant from the Bezos Day 1 Families Fund. Launched in 2018 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the Day 1 Families Fund issues annual leadership awards to leading agencies on the frontlines that are employing compassionate, needle-moving work to help families move from unsheltered homelessness and shelters to permanent housing with the services they require to achieve stability.
“We are excited to be a recipient of a grant award from the Day 1 Families Fund,” said Cathryn Vassell, CEO of Partners for HOME. “This grant will help to change the trajectory for many Atlanta families who have been impacted by homelessness.”
This one-time grant will help Partners for HOME in its tireless work to support families as they reel from skyrocketing rent costs, limited services and insufficient incomes. Partners for HOME plans to use the grant funds to support permanent housing placement for families.
Partners for HOME was selected as a Day 1 Families Fund grant recipient by a group of national advisors who are leading advocates and experts on homelessness and service provision. National advisors brought expertise on housing justice, advancing racial equity and helping programs employ resources effectively to assist families out of homelessness.
Over the past five years, the Day 1 Families Fund has provided 170 grants totaling more than $520 million to organizations around the country working to combat homelessness and help families gain housing support and stability. This year, the Fund issued a total of $123.45 million in grants to the following organizations: Carpenter’s Shelter; CATCH, Inc.; Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona; The Center for Women and Families; Changing Homelessness; Chapman Partnership; Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County; Community Action Partnership of San Luis Obispo County, Inc.; Community Services & Employment Training (CSET); Ending Community Homelessness Coalition (ECHO); Family Promise of Hawai’i; Family Promise of Northern New Castle County; Family Services of Tulare County; Flagstaff Shelter Services; Gateway180; Heartland Alliance; H.O.M.E. Inc.; Homeless Alliance; Hope House of Milwaukee; Housing First, Inc.; Housing Forward; HRDC; Ka Hale A Ke Ola Homeless Resource Centers, Inc.; LA Family Housing; Mother Nation; Nashua Soup Kitchen & Shelter, Inc.; New Reach; Oglala Sioux Tribe; Partners for HOME; PATH; The Salvation Army, Denver Metro Area; Samish Indian Nation; San Diego Regional Task Force on Homelessness; Sojourner Truth House; Solo Por Hoy, Inc.; Start Corporation; Strategies to End Homelessness; The Wellspring; YWCA Cass Clay; and YWCA Missoula’s Housing Programs.
“Based on our 2022 Point-in-Time Count, 86 families consisting of 252 individuals were experiencing homelessness on the night of January 24, 2022,” said Melissa Austin, chief operating officer of Partners for HOME. “While we did not count any families experiencing unsheltered homelessness on that night, we know there is so much work to do to ensure all families have a safe place they can call home.”
The Bezos Day One Fund made a $2 billion commitment to focus on making meaningful and lasting impacts in two areas: funding existing nonprofits that help families experiencing homelessness, and creating a network of new, nonprofit tier-one preschools in low-income communities. The Day 1 Families Fund issues annual leadership awards to organizations and civic groups doing compassionate, needle-moving work to provide shelter and hunger support to address the immediate needs of young families. The vision statement comes from the inspiring Mary’s Place in Seattle: no child sleeps outside. For more information, visit www.BezosDayOneFund.org/Day1FamiliesFund.
About Partners for HOME
Founded in 2015, the mission of Partners for HOME is to coordinate a comprehensive response system to end homelessness in the City of Atlanta. Partners for HOME serves as the Collaborative Applicant for the Atlanta Continuum of Care (CoC) — a HUD program that promotes community-wide commitment to the goal of ending homelessness and provides funding for efforts by nonprofit providers and state and local governments to quickly rehouse people impacted by homelessness. We bring together government, nonprofit, business and community stakeholders to make homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring. For more information, visit: www.partnersforhome.org.
###