San Francisco billionaire Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne are giving UC San Francisco $30 million to create a first-of-its-kind program to study the most effective ways to end homelessness.
In an exclusive interview with KCBS Radio, Benioff said the five-year research grant will create the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, which will be directed by Dr. Margot Kushel, a UCSF professor of medicine who runs the Center for Vulnerable Populations at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
"You have to be the change you seek," Benioff told KCBS Radio. "Homelessness is now the number one target of our philanthropy."
The money will help Kushel hire researchers to identify the root causes of homelessness, and find out which "best practices" are most effective at helping people get off the street and into longterm housing.
"We really have front row seats to the disastrous toll of this crisis," said Kushel, who has been treating homeless people's medical needs for more than two decades. "I often say there is no medicine as powerful as housing."
"I am not an expert on homelessness. I never said I was," said Benioff, the co-founder and CEO of Salesforce. "But I do know who the experts on homelessness are, and they're these professionals who are based on scientific truth." Benioff said it's time to craft solutions to homelessness that come from data-based research and not just ideas from "philosophers" with no real world experience.
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Dr. Josh Bamberger, a UCSF assistant professor who has devoted his career to caring for chronically homeless people at public clinics in San Francisco, will be associate director of the initiative. "We'll have some really solid data on what works," he said, "and I hope that we'll have many fewer people on the streets."
Kushel told KCBS Radio that the goal is to identify effective solutions quickly, and share them with cities, states and other entities that want to implement them.
"This is not the type of academics where things will sit in a dusty library," Kushel said. "We really intend to get answers and to turn around and to get it out to the public, and to the elected officials who need the data."
The Benioffs have been San Francisco's highest-profile philanthropists in recent years, pledging almost half a billion dollars personally and through the Salesforce Foundation to hospitals, schools, and lately, $66 million to homelessness programs. They have given almost $400 million to UCSF alone. Benioff spearheaded the successful campaign to pass San Francisco's Proposition C last November, which taxes the City's largest companies to raise money to address homelessness. Unlike some of Benioff's past efforts, the new initiative is not designed to build housing or to support family shelters, but to come up with practical answers to the persistent, chronic homelessness that's troubled San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and other large cities for decades.
"If there aren't fewer people on the streets in five years," said Bamberger, "then we haven't done our job."