Sunnyvale Community Services

Services providedsunnyvale Community Services provides financial assistance, food aid, case management, referrals, and other Services at no charge to clients. The organization's clients are the homeless, working poor, and seniors or disabled persons living on fixed incomes. The organization serves all ethnic, racial, language, age, and abilities groups.in fy2021-22, we provided one or more safety net Services to 10,595 (unduplicated) individuals, a 53% increase in seven years. Case management and financial assistance programs include:*financial assistance: scs provides emergency financial aid for rent, utilities, car repairs, medications, and other urgent needs. Last fiscal year, we assisted 7,800 individuals with financial assistance totaling $7,490,529.67. * intensive case management: scs provides case management for individuals who need assistance more than once, including people with health-related issues or who are chronically homeless. * benefits assistance: scs staff conduct outreach and initial screening to connect clients with public benefits programs and Services. * workforce development and homeless Services: the workfirst Sunnyvale program, our partnership with downtown streets team, helped 73 homeless individuals with job training and housing opportunities. * Community navigator program: since 2018, scs has trained 72 residents to be local leaders in outreach, Community service, and local advocates on housing, voter rights, and immigrant rights. * displacement support: scs also responds quickly to unexpected needs. Each year, scs works with the city of Sunnyvale to assist residents who are suddenly displaced due to fire and other disasters. Food and in-kind assistance programs for low-income children, adults, and seniors include: * produce days. Scs provided an average of 850 households (more than 2,000 people) with fresh fruits and vegetables from second harvest of silicon valley every other week. * monthly groceries. Scs provided more than 1,200 households with bags of groceries each month. * home food delivery. Last year, scs volunteers delivered healthy groceries twice a month to over 300 elderly and disabled individuals. In 2020, we added prepared meals from loaves & fishes to each delivery, totaling over 1,500 meals each month. * emergency food. Throughout the pandemic, prepacked bags of healthy and easy-to-prepare food have remained available on request, including bags specifically intended for those who lack access to kitchen facilities. 1,213 clients received these bags in the last fiscal year. * back-to-school and children's summer nutrition programs: in addition to providing 1,765 students with school supplies and gift cards for backpacks and new shoes in 2021, these programs gave kids and their families extra portions of healthy foods during summer months when schools were closed. * holiday programs: during monthly food distributions last november and december, scs provided more than 2,100 households (more than 5,900 individuals) with special holiday foods, plus grocery store and department store gift cards so that clients could buy additional food, presents for children and/or needed household items. * other assistance: scs also provides diapers and hygiene kits. Covid-19 response * as the local safety net provider, when covid-19 hit, scs quickly pivoted to adjust all our Services. Demand for all our Services surged starting in march of 2020 and remained high through the 2021-22 fiscal year. By june 2022, scs had distributed nearly $10m in financial assistance during the pandemic. * our eleven years of experience with drive-through food distributions helped us adapt during the pandemic. But many of our regular volunteers were over 65 years of age or otherwise at high risk from the coronavirus, so they could no longer safely come onsite. Corporate groups also had to cancel their volunteer shifts. An outstanding effort by our remaining volunteers, our staff members, and employees of the city of Sunnyvale ensured that we did not miss a single monthly food distribution-not even the one scheduled for the day after the shelter-in-place order took effect. We also shifted our back-to-school and holiday distributions to a drive-through format. * our new facility offered ample space so that, once covid restrictions were relaxed in 2022, we were able to carefully invite volunteers and our entire staff to work onsite. We continued to require masks to be worn onsite and used social distancing inside our facility. * the California state-wide eviction moratorium expired at the end of the fiscal year on june 30, 2022. We braced for an increase in the number of clients in need of rental assistance. Given widespread expectations of an economic downturn and rising inflation, we are preparing for the growing need for all our safety net Services.