FROM REBECA RANGEL, SENIOR DIRECTOR, ASSET FUNDERS NETWORK
SEPTEMBER 2025
AFN Short Take is a blog series highlighting insights and perspectives from recent AFN programming events.
Silicon Valley is often seen as a global symbol of innovation and prosperity. Yet behind that reputation lies some of the nation’s most urgent equity challenges—skyrocketing housing costs, a growing unhoused population, and widening racial economic disparities.
At the center of this reality are vibrant immigrant communities who make up more than 40% of the region’s population. In both Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, more than 50% of children have at least one immigrant parent. These families represent the backbone of Silicon Valley’s workforce, neighborhoods, and future.
A Regional Conversation with National Implications
Advocates and funders recently gathered virtually to explore the intersection of housing and immigrant rights in Silicon Valley. Immigrant residents are nearly twice as likely to experience housing insecurity, stemming from low wages that have not kept pace with rising rents, along with the systemic exclusion of non-citizens from shelters, rental relief, and public benefits. The result, as advocates described, is an “invisible, unhoused community”—families who are essential to the region yet shut out of systems meant to provide support.
New and more aggressive immigration enforcement tactics are exacerbating the situation. Alison Kamhi of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center described how federal agents are now sometimes arresting noncitizens in immigration court. “The immigration laws have not changed.” Kamhi said. “But new interpretations and policies make it harder for noncitizens to access relief, and aggressive enforcement creates an atmosphere of fear and confusion.” These tactics undermine due process and destabilize entire households. When a primary earner is detained or disappears, families often lose their income overnight, triggering a rapid slide into eviction and displacement.
Lorena Melgarejo of Faith in Action Bay Area named what so many families are experiencing: “two deportations”—one through federal enforcement, and another through economic removal from their homes and communities. The compounding trauma leaves families with few options and little protection.
Katrina Logan of Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto emphasized that stable housing is both a basic need and a legal shield. “Constitutional protections are strongest within your home,” she explained. “But those protections can be significantly diminished when you’re living in a car.” In this context, housing becomes a critical line of defense. It protects not only against poverty but also against civil rights violations.
Innovative Responses: What’s Working
Across the Bay Area, community-rooted organizations are responding with creativity, coordination, and care. Successful strategies share a few core principles: they are deeply local, intersectional by design, and centered on the lived experience of immigrant communities. These efforts often bridge across silos, combining housing stabilization, immigration defense, organizing, and mutual aid in ways that reflect how families actually navigate crises.
What’s working at the moment isn’t a single intervention or silver bullet, but an ecosystem approach that blends legal advocacy, peer support, rapid response, and trusted relationships.
The United Coalition for Immigrant Services, a 20-year collaborative of 16 organizations across San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, offers one powerful example of what coordinated infrastructure can achieve. The demand for timely, accessible legal information underscores both the scale of fear and the value of trusted messengers.
Legal service providers are also adapting. Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto is training community navigators—essentially grassroots paralegals—through a 40-hour program that builds legal capacity from within. This approach expands reach while respecting the knowledge and networks already present in the community.
At the same time, mutual aid networks have become essential to immediate housing stability. When families experience the dual shocks of immigration enforcement and income loss, community-led fundraising efforts are often the fastest and most trusted way to prevent eviction and keep families together while legal cases move forward.
Each of these models reinforces the same lesson: when community organizations are resourced to operate holistically, they can meet families’ basic, emergency, and long-term needs more effectively and equitably.
Strategic Recommendations for Philanthropic Action
The following recommendations outline concrete steps funders can take to align with effective interventions.
Immediate Investments:
- Legal Infrastructure: Fund deportation defense, eviction prevention, and know-your-rights education simultaneously
- Mutual Aid Networks: Support community-led rapid response funds that can address immediate housing needs during immigration crises
- Intermediary Organizations: Invest in trusted community organizations that can quickly distribute resources while protecting processes to achieve legal and economic justice.
Capacity Building:
- Community Navigator Programs: Support training initiatives that create bridges between professional legal services and community knowledge
- Coordinated Response Systems: Fund collaborative models like the United Coalition that can provide comprehensive services across issue areas
- Alternative Economic Models: Explore cooperative businesses and worker centers that provide economic stability to people vulnerable to federal enforcement
Policy and Advocacy:
- Public-Private Partnerships: Support efforts that ensure the ongoing sustainability of solutions rooted in equity and social justice.
- Local Policy Innovation: Fund municipal and county-level protections that can shield communities from federal enforcement
- Narrative Infrastructure: Invest in storytelling and research that builds public understanding of housing-immigration intersections
Meeting the Moment: Philanthropy’s Role and Responsibility
The intersection of immigration and housing is not just a policy issue. It is a measure of our collective values. As Andere reminded participants, these intersecting crises are both urgent and revealing. “Whenever they are going after a historically marginalized group,” she said, “those at the sharpest intersection of marginalization are always a test for something that is going to come later.”
How philanthropy responds will shape what comes next, not only in Silicon Valley but in communities across the country.
“This moment is requiring all of us to push beyond the usual way of doing business, to take on courageous risks, and to listen to grassroots leaders doing life-affirming work directly in communities.”
Victoria Rodarte, Northern California Grantmakers
One way to meet this challenge is by strengthening what Melgarejo calls the “relationship economy.” Philanthropy is uniquely positioned to foster the networks of trust, care, and coordination that keep communities resilient. “The most valuable currency we have in a time like this are the relationships we have that can move money, intention, time, and resources.”
Communities in Silicon Valley are already leading. The opportunity now is to follow that lead with courage, coordination, and sustained investment in intersectional solutions.
This blog is a recap of a briefing on June 24 co-sponsored by Bay Area Asset Funders Network, California Homelessness & Housing Policy Funders Network, Funders Together to End Homelessness, Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, the Grove Foundation, Northern California Grantmakers, and United Coalition for Immigrant Services.
