The Silicon Valley Guaranteed Income Project is a 2-year program designed to help participants achieve housing stability as well as greater independence over their lives, finances, and future.
Through this project, 150 Santa Clara County families who are experiencing or at-risk of homelessness will receive $1,000/month in no-strings-attached income for 24 months. This unconditional income is meant to provide families with the flexibility to decide how best to meet their needs.
This is one of the few guaranteed income projects to specifically focus on families experiencing homelessness, and our approach will also allow us to reach key priority populations, including people of color, undocumented and mixed status households, and women-led households.
This project is being spearheaded by Destination: Home and the İSí Se Puede! Collective. In addition, the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative is conducting a research study to assess the effectiveness of guaranteed income on participants’ housing and economic stability, health and overall well-being.
We believe that this project will help demonstrate the ways in which guaranteed income can help address Silicon Valley’s deep systemic inequities and severe homelessness crisis.
Why We’ve Launched this Guaranteed Income Project
Silicon Valley suffers from deep systemic inequities that are severely impacting the economic and housing stability of tens-of-thousands of families in our communities – with the greatest impacts felt by extremely low-income households and people of color.
Guaranteed income holds tremendous potential to address these systemic inequities and help families gain greater independence over their lives, their finances, and their future.
- People are the experts in their own lives and the best solutions to our affordability crisis are those that provide families with the flexibility to decide how to best meet their needs.
- In addition, a growing body of pilot projects have demonstrated the significant benefits that guaranteed income provides to low-income families and individuals.
Through this guaranteed income project, we’re seeking to advance two key goals:
- Stabilize homeless and housing-insecure families by providing unconditional, no-strings-attached cash.
- Use the data and findings to shift the narratives around guaranteed income and inform local, statewide and national policy.
Describing the Key Elements of this Project
The Silicon Valley Guaranteed Income Project will provide $1000 monthly payments for the next 2 years to 150 Santa Clara County families who are experiencing homelessness or who are unstably housed.
- Participants will have complete freedom to use these payments however they choose. This unconditional income is meant to provide families with the flexibility to decide how best to meet their needs.
This project is focused on families in Santa Clara County with at least one child (17 years or younger) who are experiencing homelessness or are unstably housed.
The Silicon Valley Guaranteed Income Project will include a rigorous research and evaluation component to assess the effectiveness of guaranteed income on participants’ housing and economic stability, health and overall well-being. The evaluation is designed as a mixed-methods randomized controlled trial and will be among the first U.S.-based studies of guaranteed income as a homelessness mitigation strategy.
- We will be surveying both the 150 project participants and a control group of 150 other individuals (who are not receiving guaranteed income payments).
- The 300 survey respondents were recruited and randomly assigned to their respective group at the beginning of the study.
- Individuals will be surveyed 6 times over the next 2+ years (appx. once every 6 months). Participants will be compensated for their time.
Notification and onboarding of participating families into the project is currently underway. Participation and enrollment are by referral only, and the project is closed to new referrals at this time.
What Makes This Project Unique: Reaching Our Most Vulnerable Residents
This is one of the few guaranteed income projects to specifically focus on unhoused and
marginalized families – and our project was specifically designed to reach these members of our community.
- Half of the participants were recruited from the County of Santa Clara’s Coordinated Entry System, which allowed us to assist unhoused families for whom guaranteed income could have a stabilizing effect.
- Half of the participants are families affiliated with the İSí Se Puede! Collective’s network of service providers in East San Jose, which allowed us to reach neighborhoods with a high proportion of families who are undocumented or mixed-status, facing overcrowding and often disconnected from traditional safety net services.
We also intentionally sought to center racial and gender equity, as people of color and women-led households are both over-represented in our target populations and disproportionately impacted by our region’s housing and affordability crisis.
About the Partners Leading this Project
The Silicon Valley Guaranteed Income Project is a collaborative project led by Destination: Home and the İSí Se Puede! Collective (which includes: Amigos de Guadalupe Center for Justice and Empowerment, SOMOS Mayfair, Veggielution, Grail Family Services, and The School of Arts and Culture at the MHP). The UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative is leading the research and evaluation study.
Other key partners include: Sacred Heart Community Service, the Santa Clara County Office of Supportive Housing and UpTogether.
In addition, the project is supported by several other private funders, including: Google.org, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and Sobrato Philanthropies.