LifeMoves

Deep gratitude and appreciation to the entire Silicon Valley Community Foundation team and community for coming together to shine the light on the challenges faced by so many of our neighbors and for creating space and grace to have such an honest and thoughtful conversation. It was such an honor to represent LifeMoves and share the stage with Nicole Taylor, Leslie Bacho, and Judith Guerrero. I also appreciate you including other amazing leaders and nonprofit partners in the audience like Poncho Guevara, Laura Bent, and #DavidCox to add their valuable perspectives. Nicole Taylor, thank you for choosing to leverage your platform to advocate, challenge, and create opportunities for powerful local investments in this critical work It is tempting to believe the narratives that poverty and homelessness are based on individual circumstances and choices rather than the systemic and structural issues at play. Because those are much harder to talk about and solve for, and we have a collective responsibility to fix them. We realize that it’s not people who are broken, it’s the systems that are broken, and have failed them. In Silicon Valley, we understand that the challenges loom large. While the area’s tech industry boom brought our region great prosperity, the gap between the poor and the wealthy only continues to widen. Today, we see staggering wealth flourishing in plain sight of heartbreaking poverty and innovative companies thrive, where thousands struggle to secure a safe place to sleep at night or food to eat. Many of our region’s once burgeoning working class are now buckling under the weight of spiraling inflation, rental hikes and a higher cost of living, problems only compounded by an acute housing shortage and lagging wages that have been stretched beyond their reasonable capacity. The pandemic protections and seismic shifts are reverting to mediocrity, but the intensity of the needs are at pandemic levels, if not higher. To provide context, at LifeMoves we have the opportunity to partner with more than 7,400 unique clients per year. We see one in three clients experiencing homelessness for the first time, one in five of our beds occupied by children, a rise in the number of 55-and-older clients, and a sharp increase in clients reporting one or more disabilities. LifeMoves is a proud agent of change in a larger ecosystem made up of public benefit organizations, public-sector partners, philanthropy, private investors, volunteers, and other stakeholders whose respective efforts aim to uplift, empower, partner, support and drive solutions to those in our communities without stable housing. What you might not see is how this impact is being delivered through LifeMoves and other critical safety net service providers, and homeless response systems for those most impacted by this crisis in communities across the region.