We hope that you are healthy and enjoying the holiday season. As we approach the end of the year, we are excited to look back on how far we’ve come in 2022. 

But first, we want to thank each of you for your continued support, partnership, and collaboration. Our Alliance is the sum of individual efforts coming together across political, business, nonprofit, and neighborhood ecosystems. Our biggest achievement, by far, is that we continue to win hearts and minds and inspire people to discover opportunities to work together in new ways to address street homelessness. We are changing the narrative, shifting the culture, and redefining what is possible when we collaborate to develop solutions.

This started with the public launch of Urban Vision Alliance in March. We announced our solution to help cities and counties to address their homelessness crisis. We highlighted leaders across diverse organizations from the private and public sector, working together on actionable and coordinated solutions. As a result, we were picked up in over 200 media outlets. 

To take this impact further, our Alliance partner, Independent Institute, featured UVA as an innovator in a bold, new documentary that they produced, Beyond Homeless: Finding Hope. This documentary highlights our approach to collaborate on large-scale solutions with a focus on the San Francisco Bay Area. The film launched February 2022 in San Francisco and we attended screenings as panelists, including one in San Antonio, TX, which was also featured in the film, where key leaders gathered from the city and county. 

In San Francisco, we are proud to have demonstrated our first proof of concept. We facilitated collaboration between Gensler and DignityMoves, leading to a 12.5% savings on a San Francisco 70-unit interim housing community, which launched in March 2022.  A special thanks to Gensler for providing pro bono architecture work for the project. We are confident that as our alliance grows over time, we will continue to reduce the costs of these projects even more.

We continue to advance our work with our San Francisco Bay Area Alliance partners, including: 

• Supporting the Salvation Army and DignityMoves on a portfolio of housing projects. 
• Growing our alliance to 37 partners, including Nextdoor, Giant Containers, and Blankets of Hope. 
• Adding our first consumer brands to the alliance, positioning UVA to have a broader reach with their customers. This reach could enable us to amplify our resource mobilization and support for new housing development projects. 
• Demonstrating the value of facilitating partnerships between nonprofits, including supporting Miracle Messages + USC + Google.org study on the impacts of friendship combined with financial support through introductions to participating service providers.
• Launching steering committee with partners RescueSF and Gensler to develop San Francisco construction cost reduction solutions.
• Partnering with IKEA Emeryville on a local impact pilot, supporting marginalized communities.

While we continue to advance our work in the SF Bay Area, we have begun to take our model to the next level. After demonstrating success with components of our model on individual projects, our next goal is to demonstrate our entire model by partnering with a city or county to develop a comprehensive plan to address their entire homelessness crisis, including building a local alliance and using the UVA platform to coordinate efforts.

To achieve these goals, we have added impressive new additions to our team, including new board members, Joey Neugart, who has experience from Change.org, and Raj Agrawal, who brings an incredible network from KKR. Also joining us this year are individuals with strong expertise in the tech sector that will lead the development of the next phase of our platform, including Lettie Malan Asaf, formerly UX Lead at YouTube, and Julie O’Dwyer, Program Manager at Meta.

In January, we will provide a more detailed overview of our 2023 goals but here is a sneak peek into what we have planned:

• Finalize a partnership with at least one city or county, securing private funding and building a local alliance to launch a new chapter.  
• Develop and launch the next version of our technology platform, providing a tool that will allow this new chapter to increase transparency and collaboration. 
• Facilitate partnerships for San Francisco Bay Area housing and support service projects, by growing our alliance and mobilizing resources.  

We continue to be inspired as we come across more individuals and organizations that want to work together on this problem. Momentum continues to grow to collaborate on and create large, scalable solutions. As we expand our alliance, we become stronger and more effective, inspiring even more hope in a positive feedback loop. 

The idea behind UVA is that all of us have decided to take action and to not wait for others to solve this crisis. This is the idea that will ultimately solve homelessness. 

We appreciate each of you deeply, and we believe more than ever in what we can achieve together. Thank you again from the entire team at Urban Vision Alliance, and we can’t wait to change the way cities solve homelessness in 2023!

With gratitude, 

Gabriel, Dawn, and the entire UVA team