YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, left, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed | Todd Johnson / San Francisco Business Times
San Francisco Business Times • Nov. 21, 2019 • By Blanca Torres
San Francisco nonprofit Hamilton Families has lured another major donation from the tech industry to help homeless families.
Google.org, the charitable arm of the search engine company, will give $850,000 and Susan Wojcicki, chief executive officer for YouTube, will put in another $500,000. The donations represent a sliver of the $1 billion commitment Google, which owns YouTube, has made toward addressing the region’s housing crisis.
Many employers and workers don’t know how to address homelessness, Wojcicki said at a press conference Thursday at the Hamilton Families shelter and service center in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district.
“We end up doing nothing because the scale of the problem overwhelms us,” she said.
While it may seem like a small amount, given that Google is a multi-billion-dollar company, the $1.35 million will help the nonprofit serve another 700 families and move about 200 families into permanent housing.
Wojcicki said YouTube employees will also volunteer at Hamilton Families next year.
The nonprofit, founded in 1985, provides programs designed to prevent homelessness, operates a shelter for homeless families, places families in permanent housing, and administers support services to children experiencing homelessness.
“The biggest challenges are the cost and availability of housing in the Bay Area,” said Margi English, chief development officer of Hamilton Families. The nonprofit has an operating budget of about $24 million.
Besides monetary donations, Google and other donors helped set up a database to track available homes for families that often use federal Section 8 vouchers to pay rent. Another thing employers can do is offer jobs, internships and training to formerly homeless people.
“There seems to be a movement toward more corporate engagement,” in housing, she said.
Family homelessness is a critical issue many people don’t think about because they think of homelessness as a single person on the street, English said.
“Every moment you can save a kid from being on the street can stop a whole cascade of problems later on,” she said, such as a lower educational achievement, higher incarceration rates, and worse health nutrition than kids who are housed.
Google.org previously granted Hamilton Families $1 million in 2014 and since 2015, more than 200 Google employees have volunteered their time.
Google is not the only major tech company to fund Hamilton Families. In 2018, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff directed $2 million to the nonprofit from Salesforce.org, the charitable foundation of the cloud software company.