For the last thirty years (yes, you read that right, JOIN turns thirty this year!), JOIN’s primary focus is and has always been ending our neighbors’ homelessness once and for all. We work day in and day out to look for, secure, and maintain permanent housing opportunities for our neighbors. Each program at JOIN is centered squarely on these two goals – get housed and stay housed.
Celebrate 30 years with us by donating today!
We are being asked to stretch ourselves and expand to provide more services to more people than ever before and we need your help to make that happen. As we hold space to reflect on and honor our 30th year of service to the community together, we’re asking our donors to make bold statement in support of our mission. We are grateful for another year of support from the Ed Cauduro Fund, who has graciously agreed to match 1:1 each and every gift up to $10,000! Help us further our impact by considering to be:
- A fellow catalyst for change monthly donor at $30 per month or $300 per month
- One of 30 people to give a $1,000 gift
- One of 10 people to give a $3,000 gift
- Or giving a gift of any size that is meaningful to you.
In two years, not one person has gone back to the streets. As we launch our 2022 Summer Appeal to celebrate thirty years, we want to highlight our Landlord Recruitment and Retention Team’s master-leasing program. In 2015, JOIN launched a new program that took our commitment to house our neighbors to a whole new level. Our Landlord Recruitment and Retention (LRRP) Team works to actively recruit private-market housing providers to partner with us in providing housing opportunities to our neighbors and runs point on one of our most effective housing approaches called master leasing. We are happy to report that in the last two years of this program’s operation, not one person has returned to the streets thanks to the partnership of LRRP and our other housing programs! So what’s master-leasing you ask? In the most simplest of terms, master-leasing is when we – JOIN – rent a private-market unit as the tenant and sublet to those we’re serving. Through a carefully crafted partnership agreement with our private-market housing providers that detail how rent gets paid, how repairs are made, how we’ll support the person in the unit, how screening is performed and more, we are able to provide housing to a multitude of people with various backgrounds and experiences who may have otherwise struggled to get approved on their own for an apartment. We couple this subletting with hands-on wrap-around services centered on the needs of our participants ranging from retention services like case management and connections to job training opportunities, all the way to in-home regular mental health care, addiction treatment and healthcare navigation support. We also partner LRRP workers who regulary visit and support participants in their homes by helping with lease compliance, re-integrating into living off the streets, and taking care of their units. 
Marlon, a tenant in one of our master-lease properties at Jolene’s First Cousin – an 11-unit SRO unit as part of a mixed-use/market-rate building is one of the stories we’re really proud to share. Marlon describes his journey like the movie where the guy crawls through the sewer to get clean on the other side. After years of instability and multiple attempts to get housing falling through and being a Street Roots vendor, Marlon finally found stability with caseworker support and placement. “[My caseworker] moved heaven and hell to get me housing,” he says. Today, in his fourth year of stability, Marlon supports building community at JFC, helping support new tenants coming into the shared space. We want to help make stories like Marlon’s the reality for so many more people living on the streets today. Our community still reels from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic fallout, and demand for our services has increased significantly. Thank you for your support thus far and we look forward to continued partnership! We can help end homelessness for good for so many in our community together.