Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County serves and advocates for families and individuals in need, especially those living in poverty. Rooted in gospel values, we work to create a more just and compassionate community in which people of all cultures and beliefs can participate and prosper. We help our neighbors in need to overcome their unique barriers to self-sufficiency and wellness. First, we alleviate conditions of chronic poverty through food, housing assistance, benefits access, senior services, and mental health services. Second, we reduce effects of situational poverty by providing an employment network, immigration legal services, refugee foster care, disaster relief, and financial literacy. Third, we prevent the cycle of generational poverty through early childhood development, parenting support, after-school learning, and youth empowerment. We strengthen communities through parish & community engagement, immigrant and refugee integration, and neighborhood development.

We envision a Valley … where every child has the opportunity to learn from cradle to career and lives in a neighborhood free from fear; where families can afford to live in safe and decent housing and eat nutritious food; where enterprising workers can earn enough to make ends meet and save for the future; where immigrants and refugees are welcomed; and where those who are imprisoned, physically and mentally ill, elderly, and vulnerable can find healing and hope.

Source: Nonprofit submitted responses

Goal One: Launching our Family Centered, Community Change Initiative providing integrated, wrap-around services, community organizing, & public policy change to help families to move out of poverty permanently

Goal Type: Grow, expand, scale or increase access to the existing programs and services.

Goal Two: Develop agency-wide client technology platform with research & evaluation capacity for a greater impact on disrupting poverty and planning for future service needs through data and evaluation methods

Goal Type: Invest in the capacity of our organization (financial, management, technical, etc.).

Goal Three: Refining agency culture for greater excellence through investment in professional development and expansion of collaborative inter-program work models

Goal Type: Invest in the capacity of our organization (financial, management, technical, etc.).

Describe an investment in leadership

Ongoing leadership development is an agency-wide priority for Catholic Charities. In late 2021, professional development opportunities for agency leaders were accessible through Catholic Charities USA in partnership with the National Leadership Alliance (NLA). NLA’s premier training and educational platform, the Leaderosity Library, hosts a full catalog of on-demand, virtual courses that serve the unique needs of social impact leaders, especially relevant to team leads, program managers, and department directors. Some courses include Equity and Nonprofit Organization Success, Ethical Leadership for Social Impact, Effective Staff Supervision, and Designing Nonprofit Programs (Needs Assessment, Theory of Change, Funding mix, and Logistics & Evaluation). In addition, the Senior Executive Team engaged in regular team coaching for leadership excellence. Managers were also encouraged to engage in other virtual and in person leadership conference opportunities with Catholic Charities USA.

This organization mobilizes for mission in the following ways:

• Strategic Partnerships

• Networks of Collective Impact Efforts

• Thought Leadership

• Raising Awareness

• Community Building

• Policy Advocacy

What are this organization’s external mobilizaton efforts?

Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County maintains and relies on a strong network of volunteers, community organizations, parishes and corporate partners to fulfill our mission. Never has this been more critical than during our COVID pandemic relief efforts when resources were quickly mobilized through existing relationships, including a major distribution of food and meals through Catholic Charities channels with hundreds of volunteers and in partnership with Second Harvest Food Bank. The agency continues its long history of robust advocacy and community engagement as to local, regional, state, and national issues affecting the populations we serve. We are part of a network of Catholic Charities USA agencies that mobilize to affect legislative change and advance social justice issues. This happens on the local level through our Advocacy and Community Engagement program and with local nonprofit collaboratives, like the Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits and the REAL Coalition.

At Catholic Charities, our staff and volunteers have done amazing work throughout the pandemic, helping ensure that families recover from the social, emotional, and economic disruption. Even as we ramped up our services, the wealth gap in our region is the highest in decades. We are responding to more families and individuals seeking our help with food, rent, jobs and other needs. Through our Food Distribution programs, we have served the equivalent of more than 20 million meals throughout the pandemic, including senior to-go meals, parish drive-through distribution to thousands of families each week, and home delivery of groceries to hundreds of seniors and people with disabilities who are home-bound. Additionally, our efforts have recently included: Helping over 1,200 families apply for rent relief to prevent homelessness; Supporting parishes as they respond to local needs with the opening of additional parish-based community markets that are open to all and provide access to a multitude of services and referral networks; Reaching out to diverse communities in high poverty neighborhoods to encourage families to get vaccinated; Connecting individuals to employment coaching and helping four times our usual number of people secure jobs; Enabling students in high poverty neighborhoods to recover from their learning loss over the past year through our extended learning program; Helping low-income families understand their current available tax benefits and file their taxes for maximum benefit; Adapting key services, including mental health, immigration legal services, family support and engagement, and employment to remote and hybrid models; and Assisting hundreds of households – primarily through the Franklin-McKinley Children’s Initiative and our Family Resource Centers and CORAL extended learning programs – to bridge the digital divide and gain connectivity and digital literacy skills, keeping them engaged in critical services during the pandemic.