Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Richmond

IMPACT TO DATE: Since 2020, R3F has disbursed almost $1.2 million to directly support Richmond residents most in need. As many have moved on and consider the pandemic “over”, we know folks are still struggling to get by.

R3F's budget for next year is $1.2 million and we are looking to raise $600k to close the gap- which includes funding for the administrative costs and disbursements for the GI program in Richmond and our County-wide project with Abundant Birth Project.

This also includes covering emergency cash set aside for urgent needs, community town hall, narrative change support, stipends for fellows and community members and community expert panel, professional development, training, and additional support from consultants and vendors

Donate to support our Rapid Response cash assistance

R3F disbursements have made an enormous impact on families' lives; addressing housing and economic security.

862 families were served with direct cash grants - $431,000

77 families were assisted with rent relief - $477,000

86 Richmond students in the WCCUSD Families in Transition program who are experiencing unstable housing or who are unhoused received $34, 900 in $200 OR $500 increments.

Over the past 24 months, we have learned a lot about the needs of Richmond residents and best practices for responding to those needs. These are a few key takeaways from our work thus far. During this time, we learned a lot about rapid response and the lacking resources for meeting guaranteed needs. These needs, such as food, utilities, and other telecommunications services like cell phones and internet access, many of us take for granted, other bills and income to pay for each of these, including a stable income to provide for shelter. We saw that folks were spending their cash grants on rent at the time and the need was clear. $500 doesn't pay rent in the Bay Area and our Rapid Response would need to support a longer-term strategy for rental support. We were activated to establish the Richmond Rent program through various partnerships while continuing cash transfers to community members to meet other guaranteed needs.

We also found that leveraging local dollars and other investments; (such as staff time, new hires, building capacity and knowledge in the field, and by cultivating relationships), helped to bring in philanthropic and private dollars. Donors were impressed with our agility and capacity to serve given the dire need of Richmond residents. There was also an interest in supporting the work given our participatory governance model in which the fund operates. While building capacity, our principles, priorities, and commitment to community-led programming garnered synergy for collective impact and successful disbursements.

Through data provided by direct recipient reports and partner financial data collection, we observed that folks overwhelmingly spent their money on food, groceries, utilities, rent, transportation, school, and household supplies. We also saw that our investments went most often into two of the lowest-income zip codes in the city.

This iterative process of ongoing learning, evaluation, and redesign allowed us to continuously refine our processes, including our internal communications with partners, ways of working together, policies, procedures, and strategies for collective impact. If we focused on traditional philanthropic models or other public-facing resource administration and not on community needs- we could have gotten stuck in research or design for too long. By staying agile to feedback from partners, as well as to the needs on the ground and operating by way of our principles, we were able to meet the immediate needs of the community. We assessed that while $500 directly made a huge impact on families- this intervention isn’t enough to stabilize folks.

R3F Core partners and the WCC Cares Coalition have continued to engage in thought partnership around this effort and are committed to shifting the way investments work in our beloved Richmond. The imperative is clear: we have to recover while responding and aim toward a sustainable future. To be most sustainable and impactful for the future, we need to move upstream in our collaborations. We are moving into a recovery framework by building a continuum of investments and strategies for an equitable recovery that includes policy change, narrative change, and systems transformation.

For the last couple of years, we have been learning and building capacity. We focused on rent and economic security and learned that while $500 directly made a huge impact on families- this intervention isn’t enough to stabilize folks. Now we moved to community engagement, narrative change, and sustaining the asset with community governance. Through our discussions with our neighbors, we will collectively decide how to impact our other priority areas.

We continue to fundraise for our Guaranteed Income Program and Direct Cash grants.

Donate to bring Richmond families a measure of peace and economic freedom.