photo of this year’s VOCA rally at the Capital in Sacramento via California Partnership to End Domestic Violence
Homelessness gets talked about as a crisis of housing. Domestic violence as a crisis of safety. But anyone paying attention knows these are not separate stories. They fall under the same narrative, one our system has never been able to articulate.
For six years, the HOME Cohort has been trying to connect these two issue areas. Together, they are building a bridge: 11 organizations, statewide, ensuring survivors do not fall through the gaps and underscoring the importance of permanent supportive housing to survivors.
This year, this work became even more urgent. Federal Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) funding collapsed. New restrictions threatened shelters. ICE raids and federal rollbacks targeted the very communities our partners serve. Amid all of this, the HOME Cohort, our partners, and community still helped to secure $100 million in state backfill, money that wasn’t in the original budget and required an extensive amount of public education and advocacy to secure.
And they’ve been telling the truth about what the data never fully captures. A mother in the Central Valley, fleeing violence with her kids, was told she “wasn’t homeless enough” to qualify for help. A woman in the Bay Area whose abuser used every legal lever to keep her trapped, and who found stability only because a HOME cohort member could step in with legal, housing, and safety support. These are not anecdotes, they are the result of systems that fail to account for gendered violence.
The HOME Cohort is more than a community project; it’s a systems change project. One needed now more than ever as the White House and federal forces push our vulnerable communities to the brink. They’re repairing broken relationships between domestic violence shelters and Continuums of Care. They’re shaping bills, influencing funding, and building statewide strategies for narrative change. They’re creating a new documentary to put survivor stories at the center, where they always should have been.
This is the kind of work that rarely gets the headlines—slow, coalition-based, transformative in ways that don’t always make the headlines. But it’s the work that keeps survivors housed, safe, and seen.
And it depends on all of us.
| Make a Year-End Gift to Women’s Foundation California |
Your support keeps the doors open in a year when everything else feels like it’s shutting down. It keeps advocates resourced, shelters staffed, and survivors connected to the housing and safety they deserve. It sustains a network that is rewriting the story in real time—one where safety and home are not luxuries, but rights.
Thank you for staying in this work with us.