A $40 million commitment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Sound Families Initiative, a program to develop new housing with support services for homeless families, or families in danger of becoming homeless, in King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties.

The Sound Families Initiative is now complete, and our comprehensive evaluation reports show that the program helped homeless families in ways far beyond putting roofs over their heads.

The legacy of Sound Families lives on in the Washington Families Fund, a unique public-private partnership created by the Washington State Legislature in 2004 to provide long-term funding for supportive services for families across the state. The fund was inspired in part by promising evaluation results from Sound Families, and it has already funded projects that will serve roughly 5,000 families over the lifetime of its 5 and 10-year grants.

Applying invaluable lessons learned from Sound Families, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with many partners in the public and private sector, will soon take a new approach to addressing family homelessness in the Puget Sound region. To apply this new thinking, the foundation will make a new set of investments to expand the work of the Washington Families Fund in the three-county area. The fund will continue to be administered by local housing and service provider Building Changes. Please visit BuildingChanges.org to learn more.