All Home: Building Pathways Out of Homelessness through Workforce Opportunities
The San Francisco Bay Area consistently tops the lists of the “most expensive places to live”, highlighting a grave challenge: full-time employment often fails to provide sufficient income to meet basic needs. This economic disconnect is at the heart of the region’s housing affordability and homelessness crisis and highlights a fundamental challenge in how we approach solutions.
All Home is a Bay Area-wide intermediary and advocacy nonprofit created to address the housing crisis by treating housing instability and employment as interconnected problems requiring coordinated solutions. All Home brought together a coalition of experienced private and public sector partners to rethink how a workforce system might serve housing-insecure people overcoming barriers to employment.
Housing programs focus on immediate housing needs and often lack resources to address long-term employment challenges. Workforce development programs, while effective at job placement, often connect participants to positions that fail to provide housing-sustainable wages in high-cost markets. This fragmented approach creates a cycle where individuals may achieve temporary stability in one area while remaining vulnerable in another. The result, especially in high-cost places, can be a cycle of recurring homelessness that existing systems aren’t designed to break.
So, the coalition is pioneering a new approach. All Home identified in-demand jobs that pay competitive wages, then partnered with employers, housing nonprofits, and training organizations to create targeted pathways to meaningful, long-term employment and housing. The result was Homes and Jobs Connect, which prepares and places housing-insecure participants into jobs with competitive wages and career advancement opportunities.
Coordination Is Key to Evolving Workforce Systems
Developing Homes and Jobs Connect required careful coordination across multiple sectors. ESG’s research has shown that “intermediaries” – organizations like All Home that are able to bring together cross-sector actors around a common vision – are critical when scaling high-quality workforce pathways.
All Home engaged ESG to help develop the Homes and Jobs Connect model. As the hub of the coalition, All Home is bringing together employers, training providers, housing service organizations, and staffing partners to create a seamless pathway that leads people into stable, good-paying jobs. The goal is to integrate paid work and skills training into existing housing support systems so that individuals can not only exit homelessness, but also build the income and stability needed to stay housed.
This requires a two-pronged approach. First, All Home is growing employer demand by building partnerships with local affordable housing operators to create pathways into in-demand property management roles. These are jobs that not only offer strong wages and benefits, but benefit from the lived experiences of the Homes and Jobs Connect participants.
Second, All Home is strengthening the talent supply by coordinating the local organizations needed to identify and train those individuals who are a strong fit for the program.
ESG and All Home partnered with JobTrain, a nonprofit educational and training organization, to deliver industry-aligned instruction in property management. They built partnerships with Abode Services and Bay Area Community Services (BACS), housing providers who could both source and support strong candidates for the program. And they integrated a B-Corp staffing agency, YUPRO Placement, to match participants to work-based learning experiences that smooth the transition into stable, full-time work.
The vision for Homes and Jobs Connect is ambitious; All Home wants to create pathways to higher wage jobs for people experiencing housing insecurity, and replicate and scale this model across the Bay Area and into other regions and industries. The program kicked off in March 2025 with 21 participants, who are in the process of being matched with employers for high-demand property management roles after completing a paid industry-specific training program provided by JobTrain. This work will serve as an early proof point for expansion, with additional cohorts launching in the next year. It demonstrates how a trusted intermediary can break down silos and build structured pathways that meet the needs of stakeholders across a workforce system.
ESG continues to be at the center of the movement to scale high-quality pathways, working alongside numerous education-to-career pathway intermediaries to ensure equitable access and impact. All Home’s success affirms that rewiring local workforce systems requires more than a single actor can deliver. It demands the kind of cross-sector coordination that intermediary organizations are uniquely positioned to facilitate. As other regions grapple with their own affordability crises, the most successful solutions will likely come from those who are also willing to rethink the fundamental relationship between work, wages, and housing stability.
