Case Studies

• 2020 grantee ($2.5 million), 2025 grantee ($2.5 million)

Friendship Place delivers innovative, person-centered solutions to family homelessness in Washington, DC. With its first Bezos Day 1 Families Fund grant in 2020, Friendship Place expanded three key programs: the Family Fund for direct financial assistance, The Brooks short-term family housing facility, and AimHire for employment support. These efforts helped more than 1,300 families overcome barriers to housing and achieve stability. With its 2025 grant, Friendship Place plans to continue providing rapid, flexible support to families in crisis, ensuring they can secure housing and rebuild their lives.

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Learn more about Friendship Place.

• 2018 grantee ($5 million), 2023 grantee ($3.75 million)

Community of Hope has spent 45 years helping families in Washington, DC move from crisis to stability through an integrated health-and-housing model. With a total of $8.75 million in Bezos Day 1 Families Fund grants received since 2018, Community of Hope has connected over 1,000 unsheltered families to housing and thousands more to vital services like childcare, job training, and healthcare. Its innovative HONEY program provides coordinated prenatal and postpartum care for pregnant individuals experiencing homelessness. The organization’s approach has contributed to an 18% decrease in family homelessness in DC, proving that compassionate, system-wide solutions drive lasting change.

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Learn more about Community of Hope.

2020 grantee ($5 million), 2025 grantee ($5 million)

Guided by its vision that no child sleeps outside, Mary’s Place provides shelter, outreach, and housing navigation to help families in the Seattle area find stability. Its first Bezos Day 1 Families Fund grant in 2020 enabled the organization to expand diversion strategies and meet unprecedented needs during the pandemic, helping 2,700 families secure housing. With its 2025 grant, Mary’s Place plans to pilot an Intensive Acute Outreach Program, add 200 shelter beds with wraparound services, and scale tools that connect families to permanent housing.

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Learn more about Mary’s Place.

• 2019 grantee ($2.75 million), 2024 grantee ($2.5 million)

Shortly after Family Gateway received its first Day 1 Families Fund grant in 2019, two other shelters in Dallas closed, leaving Family Gateway as the only shelter serving families in the area. The organization increased its focus on helping families avoid shelter, and for those who required shelter, Family Gateway renovated a local motel, transforming it into a family-friendly refuge that provides each family with private living space. The organization also used the flexible grant dollars to fund temporary hotel stays for families awaiting shelter space. Overall, the grant helped Family Gateway quadruple the number of families they serve each year.

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Learn more about Family Gateway.

• 2019 grantee ($2.75 million), 2024 grantee ($2.5 million)

HOPE Services Hawaii received its first Day 1 Families Fund grant a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the funds helped the organization serve as a critical lifeline to families during the crisis, including by helping connect families to pandemic relief funds and launching a master leasing program for families. Their work is making a lasting impact: 90 percent of people connected with housing by HOPE Services Hawaii remain housed at least two years later.

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Learn more about HOPE Services Hawaii.

• 2019 grantee ($1.25 million), 2024 grantee ($1.25 million)

Welcome House has put its first Day 1 Families Fund grant to fantastic use by constructing a state-of-the-art, 20,000-square-foot Shelter for Homeless Women, Children, and Families that consolidates their services for families experiencing homelessness into one facility. The new building has doubled Welcome House’s capacity to shelter families. Since January 2020, Welcome House has provided shelter to more than 150 families, and 74% of them have exited the shelter into a positive housing situation.

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Learn more about Welcome House.

• 2018 grantee ($5 million), 2023 grantee ($5 million)

CCSWW took a multi-pronged approach to leveraging its first Day 1 Families Fund grant, including opening a drop-in day center for families and forging partnerships with organizations across the community to improve equitable access to housing and services for all families facing a housing crisis. This work has helped divert about 450 local families from homelessness.

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Learn more about Catholic Community Services of Western Washington.

• 2018 grantee ($5 million), 2023 grantee ($5 million)

Crossroads Rhode Island used its first Day 1 Families Fund grant to invest in a range of interventions—from offering emergency assistance to divert families from homelessness to bringing on board a housing navigator to help families in need identify safe and affordable housing. “We know our model and these resources can get us to functional zero with family homelessness,” says Karen Santilli, CEO of Crossroads Rhode Island.

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Learn more about Crossroads Rhode Island.

• 2020 grantee ($2.5 million)

The Day 1 Families Fund grant unlocked a previously unobtainable level of staff capacity that helped MAHUBE-OTWA expand and solve issues specific to the very rural area it serves. Three years after receiving the grant, the team has connected more than 1,500 families with needed services, and some counties it serves are down to the single digits of people experiencing homelessness.

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Learn more about MAHUBE-OTWA.

• 2018 grantee ($5 million), 2023 grantee ($3.75 million)

As a leader in addressing rising homelessness in Charlotte, The Salvation Army of Greater Charlotte used its first Day 1 Families Fund grant to “say ‘yes’ to more families who were in crisis and keep whole families—including dads and teenaged sons—together,” according to Deronda Metz, the organization’s director of social services. The grant helped The Salvation Army of Greater Charlotte launch programs for both children and adults to improve their wellbeing and expand its diversion efforts, which has helped 275 families stay out of homelessness.

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Learn more about The Salvation Army of Greater Charlotte.