Investing in What Matters The Most

United Way L.A.’s core mission is to make strategic investments that help our neighbors living in crisis while ensuring everyone has the resources and tools to create prosperity for their families and communities.

From community college students who struggle to pay for housing or secure their next meal to formerly incarcerated people who need help navigating the reentry system, we find the right partners across Los Angeles County to help people get back on their feet and keep going.

As we close the 2023 fiscal year, we celebrate this year’s investments of $19.2M in 388 new and renewal grants going to organizations that serve the most vulnerable communities in L.A.

Overall, we managed 454 overall grants, and we distributed those funds among 319 unduplicated partners.

In the ending fiscal year, we proudly funded initiatives and programs in the following areas:

Accelerating Supportive Housing (in partnership with the CA Community Foundation)
Advancing Housing Justice
Alternatives to Incarceration
Capacity Building Commissioned Grants (Various Purposes)
Community Care + Power
Community College
Coordinated Entry System Regional Flex Funds
Emergency Food and Shelter Program (EFSP) – Phase 40
Gas Assistance Fund – Partner Expansion
Homeless Workforce Capacity Building
Homelessness Narrative Change (Pilot Phase)
Mayor’s Inside Safe Initiative
Older Adult Grants
Shelter Improvement
Siemer Family Stability Program

One of our most recent investments is in the Shelter Improvement Initiative.

While United Way’s long-term goal remains ensuring every Angeleno has access to permanent housing, we believe it’s critical to make sure people experiencing homelessness have access to essential resources and services to begin and complete their journey toward permanent housing.

One of the best ways to do it is by improving shelters’ operations, services, and capacity to serve more people, increase bed utilization rates and reduce the time people stay at their shelter sites. Over the last two years, this initiative, funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, has invested $5.9M into 52 shelter sites across L.A. County, impacting more than 4,600 shelter beds. Some of those sites are already doing trauma-informed upgrades to their facilities’ common areas, dorms, or dining areas so that their clients can find a place to heal and recover in these spaces.

This year, we also awarded 181 local organizations with a total of $5.9 million in EFSP funds to prevent more people in Los Angeles from falling into homelessness by providing critical emergency support to local community partners helping with rent/mortgage, shelter, and food assistance to families and individuals in need.

For the past 40 years, United Way of Greater Los Angeles has led the EFSP local board in awarding over $200 million in federal EFSP funds, and over the last 12 months, more than 240,000 meals were served by these organizations collectively. Altogether they also operate over 1,000 shelter sites across LA County, with a nightly shelter bed capacity of just over 13,400.

These are just a couple of the many initiatives we funded this fiscal year, and while each has a specific goal, all together have the ultimate purpose of ending racial and socio-economic inequities for historically marginalized communities of color in our region and also serve as a model for the rest of the country. But we cannot do it alone. We need every person to get involved, because together we can create shared prosperity for all!

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