The Heart of Community: Why Black-Led Healing Deserves to Be Fully Seen and Fully Funded

There are few things more powerful than a child learning they are worthy of care.

At Homeless Children’s Network (HCN), this belief shapes everything we do. For more than 30 years, we’ve walked alongside children and families in San Francisco experiencing homelessness, trauma, and systemic barriers, offering not just services—but belonging. What we provide is holistic and deeply rooted: culturally-affirming therapy, family support, leadership programs for Black youth, Afro-centric healing spaces, and much more.

Our work is as complex as the communities we serve. And yet, we are often defined only by the crises we respond to—not the ecosystems we nourish.

A new report, California Black-led Organizations: Strengthening California’s Economy & Communities, helps change that narrative. Produced by the Nonprofit Finance Fund and the Black Equity Collective, the report affirms something HCN has long known: Black-led nonprofits are not simply service providers—they are essential infrastructure.

Across the state, Black-led and Black-empowering organizations are doing what many systems cannot: reaching communities in moments of deepest need, providing care that is culturally and spiritually grounded, and building models of collective well-being that are as healing as they are effective.

The report’s findings paint a compelling picture:

Nearly three-quarters of surveyed organizations employ staff with lived experience.

BLOs contributed more than $335 million in salaries last year and hired over 4,000 people—many from historically marginalized backgrounds.

Over 80% are seeing rising demand for their services, even as funding levels fall short.

This reflects what we see every day at HCN. Programs like Ma’at and Entre Nosotros thrive because they are designed by and for the community. Our staff are not just professionals—they are neighbors, cultural holders, mentors. They bring lived wisdom into clinical spaces, where healing becomes a reclamation, not just a goal.

Yet, like many of our peers across California, we operate with limited resources. Our budgets rarely match the scope of our impact. We do the work anyway—because we believe in the vision. But we also know: belief alone isn’t enough to sustain a movement.

This moment is asking something of all of us

What happens when the people who carry the soul of a community are asked to do so without a safety net?

The report makes it clear: Black-led organizations like HCN are consistently under-resourced, even as they fill some of the most urgent gaps in care. And with recent cuts to nonprofit funding, many of us are being stretched to breaking points—trying to meet skyrocketing need with shrinking support.

But there is another way forward.

What if we saw funding not just as a transaction, but as a relationship? What if investments reflected trust—in the leadership, in the community, in the vision for justice that Black-led organizations embody?

What if philanthropy aligned not only with outcomes, but with the process of liberation itself?

At HCN, we believe that transformation happens when people feel seen, heard, and supported. That includes the people doing the work. That includes the organizations carrying generations of trauma and hope on their shoulders.

“Our story,” the report says, “is that Black-led and Black-empowering organizations not only hold the soul of their community… but are also a driving force of economic vitality.”

We invite funders and partners to sit with that truth. To listen to the stories behind the data. To understand what’s at stake—not just for our organizations, but for the communities we hold.

This is not a callout. It’s a call in.

Partnership as practice

To invest in organizations like HCN is to invest in stability, possibility, and generational healing. It means ensuring that when a family walks through our doors in crisis, we don’t have to choose between cutting a program or cutting a position. It means trusting our expertise, our lived knowledge, our proximity to both pain and potential.

It means funding not just what we do—but how and why we do it.

The report offers a vision of what’s possible when funders move with alignment and courage:

• Multi-year, unrestricted support that honors the full cost of care

• Investments in infrastructure, not just output

• Recognition that healing work is both spiritual and economic

At HCN, we know what our communities need because we are of them. We’ve known how to respond long before reports captured it in data.

But now the data is here. And so is the opportunity.

Let’s not allow this moment to pass us by. Let’s create a new funding story—one grounded in equity, sustainability, and the shared belief that every child and every family deserves to feel safe, seen, and supported.

Together, we can build a future where care is not contingent. Where healing is not a privilege. Where the work of Black-led organizations is fully resourced, not just rhetorically praised.

It’s time. Here is how you can be a part of the movement.

Donate – Your contribution helps us provide culturally rooted care, leadership programs, and vital mental health services to families and youth across San Francisco.Make a donation today →

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