The housing crisis in our area doesn’t always need a construction permit. Sometimes it just needs an open door…
Back in May, we announced that The United Effort Organization (UEO) had won our $25,000 Live Where You Work grant. A few months later, we want to show you what that grant looks like once it leaves the check and reaches someone’s front door.
UEO’s application built upon this insight: some of the best housing stock in Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Mountain View isn’t a future construction site. It’s the cottages, converted garages and spare bedrooms already sitting behind people’s homes, unused. The United Effort Organization’s mission is bigger than housing. They help people experiencing or at risk of homelessness move toward self-sufficiency through housing search, benefits navigation, budgeting help and mentoring, an approach that they call Whole Person Advocacy. Housing is where a lot of that work lands, and co-founders Claire Hubel and Wei Qun E have built a genuinely individualized model for it.
Judy Fusco, a longtime Los Altos resident, is one of the homeowners living out of that model. Her father survived war and displacement before rebuilding a life in Taiwan, and he left his children one instruction Judy has since passed down to her own kids: “always do good in the world.” Three years ago, that instruction is exactly what led her to offer up the cottage behind her house.
Her first guest was Scott, a man who worked steadily but, like so many people who keep this community running, couldn’t find a place to live he could afford. Four more neighbors have moved through that cottage since, each arriving as United Effort Organization helped the last one move on to something more permanent. Her fifth guest arrived this summer needing a temporary landing spot while job hunting, and that placement is the one we’re proudest of: it’s the first placement United Effort Organization made possible, using our Live Where You Work grant.
One grant. One organization with a model that works when funded. A fifth neighbor is housed, with more homeowners already in United Effort Organization’s pipeline. Multiply that across LAMVCF’s three communities (Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Mountain View), where hundreds of cottages, in-law units and spare bedrooms sit empty while the people staffing our schools, stores and hospitals struggle to find anywhere nearby they can afford, and the case for this idea makes itself.
Watch United Effort Organization’s impact story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VmAuvknjbs
Read more about their challenge application: https://lamvcf.org/a-2lamvcf-awards-live-where-you-work-challenge-grant-to-the-united-effort-organization/