Empower unhoused Angelenos with financial + social capital

Affordable housing and homelessness

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

When you don’t have a stable home, some things become wildly hard. Other things become incredibly easy.
For Nicole, a Samaritan Member, it was hard to get good sleep. It was hard to keep herself safe. As a byproduct of this reality, it became easy to develop a mental illness and substance use disorder, which drove bouts of survival sex and criminal activity. Then, it became even harder to survive—to source real meals, human care, shelter.
The sum total of these impacts made it near-impossible to access care and make consistent progression through the 27 steps necessary to secure stable housing & income. A single misstep in our complex safety net often dramatically halts progress and maintains a terrifying status quo: that unhoused folks live on average 30 years less than those housed.
Samaritan exists for anyone on or near the street to gain the financial & social capital needed to reach housing and life goals. First Nicole, now 500 residents in LA, then 1,000s more from there.

Samaritan is a support platform that health and social services teams use with their clients (like Nicole) experiencing homelessness, providing targeted financial and social capital to enable action steps towards stability. In LA, Samaritan has partnered with CommonSpirit-Dignity Health, HealthcareLA, and Molina to help 200 unhoused Angelenos take steps forward through:
Cash bonuses when participants take a positive action step that they set with a caregiver towards housing, income, or care goals Unconditional financial capital from a team of ‘samaritans’ to clear out needs that are barriers to taking action steps
Social support from local volunteers and people with lived experience, who offer texts, emails, or phone calls to the Member with consistent affirmation and other in-kind support.
Unconditional capital helps Members like Nicole by covering part of the cost of survival (like food, shelter, phone bills, and outstanding debts), lessening her financial need to engage in survival-based activities. Conditional capital then rewards her with funds as she moves along the 27 steps to recovery in her case management plan.
Coupled with social support, this process creates a positive feedback loop that helps a Member move from the streets, back into housing and health. And it works—through action steps and met social/financial needs over time, Nicole ended up becoming a forklift operator at Goodwill and finally found stable housing, after 10 years on the street.

Samaritan aims to significantly improve LA street outcomes—reducing time spent on the street, improving social services retention, and increasing access to much needed care.
In 2024, Samaritan is increasing the conditional and unconditional financial support we provide to a larger pool of 500 Members. A successful 200-person pilot revealed that over 80% of Angeleno Members regularly attended or re-engaged with care this way, with many experiencing significant improvements in their access to housing, income, and care within 12 months.
Generating better outcomes for more people allows us to directly get more Angelenos off the streets and into stability, while unlocking partnerships with the California public health sector to serve more Members, reduce eligibility restrictions, and ultimately grow to be the ‘great unblocker’ for any and every person in the city experiencing extreme poverty, who can’t access the help they need to move forward.

Samaritan tracks data through a mixture of external studies performed by third-party healthcare evaluators and statistics on our own software platform. We’ve seen significant momentum and success over our pilot program this past year - in LA, 80% of Samaritan Members are now regularly accessing care, up from 30%. 85% of all case management steps assigned to Members have also been completed—an unprecedented figure when it comes to individuals taking real, tangible steps forward.
External review from the Kaiser Center for Community Health and Evaluation (CCHE) have further confirmed that participating in Samaritan led to a 54% reduction in average healthcare costs per Member compared to a matched control group, and a 91% increase in compliance with care over a year.
Samaritan Members have directly noted the program’s efficacy: "The financial incentives and encouragement make a big difference in my life. I feel supported and motivated to achieve my goals in a new way." -Samaritan Member