Silicon Valley homeless services provider has new leadership

HomeFirst’s new leader says the homeless support services nonprofit is looking to turn the page.

René Ramirez was permanently appointed as CEO last month, after his predecessor Andrea Urton stepped down in July amid turmoil within the organization. Ramirez, who at that time was chief operating officer, became the interim CEO. After a nationwide search, the board chose Ramirez to continue leading the nonprofit.

Ramirez has been with HomeFirst since 2015, starting off as director of services and moving up to chief operations officer where he oversaw the facilities, human resources, quality control, compliance and DEI departments for eight years.

HomeFirst serves between 6,000 to 6,500 people a year in Santa Clara County and provides a variety of homeless support services, including at shelters, hotels converted into temporary housing and tiny home sites, and does street outreach. It has contracts with Santa Clara County and multiple cities, including San Jose.

In 2023, it had a budget of $50 million, with more than $40 million coming from government funding. Its revenue has more than doubled since 2019. The nonprofit’s strategic plan for 2023-26 includes growing its revenue by $21 million, improving the employee vacancy rate and improving housing outcomes.

San José Spotlight spoke with Ramirez about taking the top leadership role and what’s next for HomeFirst. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

San José Spotlight: How did you get into the field of homelessness and what draws you to this work?

Ramirez: Most of my adult life has been in community services. My parents were foster care parents for many years. It was something that just always stuck with me, and so I wanted to do something to help kids and others.

I worked at the Silicon Valley Education Foundation for 11 years, but when I first got there, it was supporting children and families in a very specific neighborhood in southeast/central San Jose. My charge was to go out and figure out what the community needed.

From there I went to the Alum Rock Counseling Center working in children and family services, as it related to mental health. That led me to HomeFirst. What really drew me to HomeFirst is I was going through the interview process and visited Sobrato House, one of our properties. And Sobrato House was offering shelter to formerly foster care youth. And I was like, oh, that’s exactly what I want to do.

What are your priorities for HomeFirst as you look toward the future?

One of the more immediate priorities for me is to spend some time in partnership development. We’ve been very good partners to our cities and counties. Who else should we be partnering with? We’ve been spending a lot of time trying to develop partnerships with people with lived experience and incorporating their views and their experiences into the work that we do. So what about our advocate partners?

Anything you are planning to do differently from your predecessor?

I’d say yes and no. We are following a strategic plan that we launched a year and a half ago, so we’re not necessarily moving away from it. Going forward we need to be very nimble in response to the community’s needs. What the community needs today, tomorrow and beyond. Today, the focus feels like we need to hurry up and get people off the street, which is coming from our elected officials.

There were allegations of racism and a toxic work culture at HomeFirst. What steps has the nonprofit taken to change the culture?

It’s very difficult for any organization to defend themselves publicly in those allegations, because you can’t provide the details why someone was terminated. But today, we’re looking at turning the leaf here. We’ve addressed those challenges and we’ve resolved them.

We continue to invest in our workforce development. We weren’t going to let those allegations steer us away from our strategic plan. And one of the primary initiatives in that strategic plan is creating a great place to work. We’ve been creating employee resource groups. Before the allegations, we hired a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) director. We also had an outside HR and DEI audit recently, and there were no findings.

We did a third party employee engagement survey around the same time as the allegations and 65% of the workforce participated,  with a positive response about our culture.

Cities and the county are looking for more accountability, including more in-depth reporting through metrics. How will you address this?

That’s driven by the city and county, I would refer to the city and county to answer that question. We’re always going to respond to the metrics. The metrics are fairly straightforward: Are they getting support services? How quickly are people moving into housing or shelter? I wouldn’t think there’s anything in terms of metrics that’s going to be a big difference in how an organization operates.

Every quarter, we bring all of our services leaders into a room for a two-day session with our quality control department and we review individual program data. Based on participant responses, each team then creates or updates or modifies their action plans.

What are some challenges in helping homeless residents?

The greatest systematic challenge is the lack of affordable housing. For every 100 people that are low income or extremely low income, there’s only 30 units. And so that’s what we need as a community, is more extremely low-income units for homelessness.

When sweeps occur, is there a reason why HomeFirst outreach workers aren’t there to provide supportive services?

If we want to build trust with folks, we can’t also be the people that are coming in and being part of the sweeps. The better option is to help ahead of the sweeps. Prepare folks, help them pack up, try to get them to move along. That’s where we put our effort. And then come back afterward to see if there’s anyone still there and offer them support.

What are some of the challenges social workers face in the field?

They are seeing very difficult situations day in and day out. It’s frustrating to work with an individual who you’re building rapport with, and the situation isn’t progressing for the better.

We keep our case loads relative to the program that we operate in. In most cases across the agency, there isn’t a caseload of more than like 25. We have ratios that are often dictated by contracts. But we can’t predict the level of difficulty of each individual.

Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X.