An Organization of “Yes”for Families With Nowhere to Go

In San Francisco, affording a two-bedroom apartment takes roughly three full-time minimum-wage jobs. For a single parent, the math doesn’t work. Families can easily end up living in cars or couch surfing in one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Compass Family Services spends its days helping to make that math add up for the most vulnerable families. 

Compass calls itself an “organization of yes.” For more than a century it has served San Francisco families who are homeless and those at imminent risk, helping support them toward safety, stability, and dignity. The families Compass serves are largely invisible. They are not in the tents that dominate the city’s image of homelessness; they are sleeping on couches or in cars, keeping their children out of sight. However, family homelessness was the only category that rose in San Francisco’s most recent point-in-time count of homeless residents, showing how difficult it is for parents with children to make ends meet.

The organization began in 1914 as Travelers Aid, meeting newcomers to the city who arrived for the world’s fair and helping them settle in or find their way home. By the mid-1990s its leaders, long based in the Tenderloin District, had studied the hardship around them and reoriented the mission realizing that one of the strongest predictors of adult homelessness was experiencing it as a child. Renamed Compass Family Services, it set out to break that cycle by lifting whole families into lasting stability.

Today Compass runs 14 programs organized around four measures of stability: housing, childcare, employment, and physical and mental health. Housing is the largest piece, spanning shelter, transitional and permanent housing, rental subsidies, housing navigation, and homelessness prevention. Each year it serves 11,000 parents and children in some 4,000 families, with approximately 90 percent of those who complete its housing programs still housed a year later.

Finding Creative Solutions – Another Path to “Yes”

The “yes” shows up by addressing gaps in the service system. A donor-funded Family Stability Fund lets Compass solve one-off crises that traditional funding won’t cover, from a car repair that saves a job to the purchase of a motorized wheelchair for a father with a spinal condition. When staff noticed families falling through system cracks because they didn’t score high enough on the city’s homelessness assessment to qualify for housing, they built a new program to help these families find and secure housing. “There is not a one-size-fits-all solution to bringing people out of homelessness,” CEO Erica Kisch says. 

Some families find that footing at Compass Clara House, a 13-unit building in Hayes Valley where families live for up to 18 months with onsite childcare, weekly case management, deep support, and community. Jessy arrived there having lived on the street with her 18-month-old daughter, Skyla. At Clara House, she gained the stability required to train for work, find a steady job as a prep cook, and move into her own apartment with more than $10,000 in her savings account. 

With donor support, Compass can keep saying “yes” to families with nowhere to go.