Women’s Fund of Santa Barbara Celebrates 20th Year with $1.125 Million to Nonprofits

Grants Support Mental Health, Homelessness, and Childcare Services for Families and Youth

The Women’s Fund of Santa Barbara funded 10 nonprofits in its 20th year, including LEAP, which provides bilingual childcare for low-income families. | Credit: Courtesy

Elizabeth Funk has one mission. It’s to offer everyone in the Santa Barbara area a place to sleep indoors if they want one.

How they do this, said Funk, the CEO of an organization called DignityMoves, is to calculate exactly how much it would cost to get everyone inside, and then fundraise from the community.

“Because interim housing is relatively inexpensive compared to permanent housing, the private sector can step up and make a meaningful contribution,” said Funk. “While other organizations try and address multiple different issues within homelessness, we have just the one.”

Even though Santa Barbara County has good metrics to calculate how many temporary housing units are needed to get everyone off the streets, Funk said that one of the biggest obstacles they face is that people don’t think it’s possible.

“When you add up the cost and the number of people in need, it’s actually quite simple,” said Funk. “But people aren’t used to thinking about homelessness with a solution in sight.”

Dignity Moves received $125,000 in a grant from the Women’s Fund of Santa Barbara to build a family-oriented interim housing unit, a feat that Funk said will inch them closer to housing everyone in need.

“There is a finish line, and we’re almost there,” she said.

The Women’s Fund awarded DignityMoves and nine other local nonprofits $1.125 million during a presentation at the Lobero Theatre on May 7. The awards had been whittled down from a list chosen by the fund’s members, who are exclusively women, with a focus on helping women and children.

Kerry Parker, communications co-chair of the Women’s Fund, said that once a year, the fund sends its members a list of nonprofit organizations vetted through an extensive research process and a ballot. Members can also send in names of nonprofits, which go into a larger pool before the competitive vetting process begins.

“We have a database of 150 nonprofit organizations who we ask to provide financial data, and our investigators check their state and federal certifications,” said Parker. “We need to make sure these organizations are viable and can carry out the projects they are proposing.”

From there, the organizations are invited to join the 150 approved nonprofits. Because the Women’s Fund is exclusively volunteer based, it draws on the talent and expertise of local community members.

“The types of questions our investigators ask are: Does the project this organization proposes meet the needs of the community?” Parker said. “Do they have other funding options? Does the organization have a way to measure the effectiveness of the project?”

The money a select number of their applicants receive is a combination of member donations, their member’s yearly fee, and contributions from outside individuals and businesses.

DignityMoves, which added tiny homes on Santa Barbara Street (pictured), received $125,000 from the Women’s Fund, which DignityMoves CEO Elizabeth Funk said will inch them even closer to housing everyone in need. | Credit: Courtesy

Among the nine awardees was Casa Pacifica, which received $90,000 for the expansion of its mobile youth crisis services. It’s an organization that responds to mental health emergencies for children and youth under 20 in Santa Barbara County.

Roya Alt, the communications director at Casa Pacifica, said they plan to use the money to hire a crisis care team of therapists and behavioral-health case managers who arrive on site to conduct assessments and evaluations.

Alt said that the youths are sometimes sent for treatment as far as Northern California. Having a team of Crisis Care workers is going to bolster the organization’s ability to respond to youth crises in real-time, she said.

“The goal is to reduce psychiatric hospitalization, incarceration, and any out-of-home placement,” Alt explained. “Our work is to stabilize them, connect them with mental health support, and keep the families unified.”

LEAP (Learn, Engage, Advocate, and Partner) received $120,000 from the Women’s Fund to cover a temporary funding gap in the agency’s budget. It’s an organization that provides state-subsidized bilingual childcare for low-income families. They have two children’s centers and a family resource center in Goleta.

Kara Shoemaker, the director of development, said the center primarily serves working and immigrant families. Many of their families are barely making ends meet, and some children they serve are in foster care.

“Families are struggling to find childcare in much of the area,” she said. “For a lot of the families, the children don’t necessarily speak the language or they’ve just gone through the immigration process.”

Shoemaker said that the State of California is renegotiating reimbursement rates for the center, which are expected to rise in 2025. In the meantime, the center faces pressing financial challenges.

“The expenses have risen since the pandemic with inflation, and state reimbursement rates haven’t caught up,” she said. “We are so grateful to the Women’s Fund, which has stepped up to help us in the meantime.”