Amazon’s Bezos gives $5M to local homeless agency
Group helps families find housing
A Maricopa County agency that provides shelter for families without a place to live will be able to help more people after receiving a grant from the chief executive of online retail giant Amazon.
UMOM New Day Centers was among 24 agencies nationwide that will receive a piece of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ latest philanthropic effort, the Day 1 Families Fund, which Bezos directs with his wife, MacKenzie.
The fund, targeted specifically at homeless service providers, announced a collective $97.5 million in its first round of grants. UMOM will receive $5 million.
“We feel very fortunate and very blessed,” UMOM CEO Darlene Newsom said. “This is a gift that is going to have a huge impact.”
Maricopa County’s homelessness crisis is spreading faster than service providers can keep up. This year, the county’s annual tally of people experiencing
homelessness rose yet again, leaving emergency shelters no choice but to add families onto an ever-growing wait list.
Today, the countywide list contains over 200 families. The average family waits almost three months for a spot in a shelter.
With the Bezos grant, UMOM plans to take direct aim at the list, hiring extra employees and opening spare units in a push to move families through the shelter and into permanent housing.
“The goal of the Day 1 Families Fund awards is to shine a light and support the organizations that are doing compassionate, needle-moving work to provide shelter for young families in communities across the country,” Jeff Bezos wrote in the announcement.
UMOM, which has an annual budget of around $20 million, will receive $1.25 million each of the next four years.
Newsom said the money will go straight into services. The agency plans to rearrange its existing building, near 33rd Avenue and Van Buren Street, to open up 26 more rooms. It will also hire employees across its social-work spectrum, boosting what’s known in housing circles as “wraparound services.” At UMOM, those include employment training, child care, help searching for permanent housing and a wellness clinic.
Taken together, Newsom said, the improvements will help UMOM take in an extra 100 families a year. As families move through the shelter and into housing, the county’s wait list will shrink.
“The whole goal is for homeless families’ experience with homelessness to be rare, brief and non-recurring,” Newsom said. “There’s really going to be a big push with the families, with all the wraparound services to get them out of the shelter and into permanent housing.”
Bezos’ grants come one week after Amazon’s high-profile HQ2 announcement, which revealed plans to build massive operations near New York City and in northern Virginia. In both neighborhoods, the news stoked fears of spiking rents and pushed-out affordable housing.
Both of those things have already come to the Phoenix metro area. In January, Maricopa County recorded yet another increase in its annual count of people experiencing homelessness, spurred by an affordable housing crisis that is now a decade old.
The 2018 Point-In-Time Count, a which enlists teams of volunteers to literally count people they find on the streets and in shelters, found 6,298 people experiencing homelessness.