Funding Community Ownership
Several of the FSMV cofounders pose together in June 2024 to commemorate the official nonprofit status of the MVCLT at a celebration with volunteers, supporters, beneficiaries, and local elected officials.
(Photo courtesy of Azucena Castañon, Mountain View Solidarity Fund)
In the spring of 2021, seven Latina women in Silicon Valley cofounded Mountain View Solidarity Fund ( Fondo de Solidaridad de Mountain View , or FSMV), a bilingual effort to financially support primarily working-class Latino migrants impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. As they were long-term members of the community, the cofounders’ personal experiences familiarized them with the struggles faced by working-class immigrant communities.
“For the most vulnerable working-class families, especially undocumented ones, the impact was twofold,” explains FSMV cofounder Olga Melo. On one hand, families were instructed to stay home, often in close quarters, where it was difficult to quarantine from others if symptomatic, resulting in high disparities in infection rates. On the other, stay-at-home orders crippled incomes for wage earners and day laborers who were unable to work from home.
Building upon decades of community organizing experience and connecting directly with families in need were central to the fund’s mission. “[The pandemic] was a time of shock for them,” recalls cofounder Paula Perez. “We saw that urgent need in families as leaders, because we had the opportunity to participate in different meetings at the schools, the church, and the community. We listened to all the suffering that those families were going through, so that allowed us to stand up and unite with the other fellow leaders.” In three years, FSMV distributed more than $2 million in private and public funds as direct aid to families.
As COVID-19 infection rates dwindled and people returned to work, the FSMV leadership decided to maintain their advocacy momentum and turn their energy toward a crisis they have long advocated solutions for: affordable housing. In collaboration with local volunteers, the FSMV leaders identified the community-owned land trust model as a solution—a nonprofit trust that purchases and stewards land so that low-income residents can purchase housing units at below-market rates, rendering the housing affordable in perpetuity. In September 2024, the fund renamed themselves the Mountain View CLT (MVCLT). The nonprofit is chaired by local citizen volunteers and advised by the FSMV cofounders so that they can continue to utilize the democratic governance structure that was so crucial to the initial momentum of the fund. The values that drove the useful redistribution of funds during the pandemic are at the forefront of MVCLT’s mission, namely the prioritization of community voices in the call for self- governance of tangible resources. More broadly, the MVCLT cofounders demonstrate that grassroots community leaders play a critical goal in bridging the gap between government resources and vulnerable populations. Distrust in government is a growing concern, especially as local governments across the country increase coordination with federal immigration enforcement. MVCLT may therefore serve as a model of how local leaders can advocate on behalf of their communities and inspire public-private partnerships in which local governments proactively support intermediaries in their role in connecting residents to resources.
Mutual Aid
According to the American Immigration Council, millions of United States residents were ineligible for pandemic-era federal stimulus measures because they were noncitizens. This was largely due to a Social Security number eligibility requirement for direct payments, which meant members of the undocumented immigrant community were denied federal resources. Local community efforts attempt to bridge this gap in access to resources.
Even if local governments and nonprofit organizations want to support noncitizens, research shows that many immigrants are reluctant to accept government aid. Many fear incurring the attention of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), risking deportation and family separation or undermining future citizenship applications. Well-meaning government representatives who want to connect foreign-born residents to publicly funded resources cannot easily communicate with populations that are hesitant to interact with any government agency.
The FSMV cofounders’ interviews with community members documented the obstacles that families faced in accessing basic needs during the pandemic. Common themes in the testimonies included frustration or confusion with bureaucratic paperwork and acute financial, emotional, and health stress. “That’s why we decided to be a different organization,” Perez says. “We wanted to be direct delivery, without intermediaries, without waiting in the mail, without waiting in line. We didn’t want families to experience more stress going through an application process with enormous requirements.” Instead, families were handed cash or checks, and they had the “freedom to decide where they wanted that money to go,” Melo adds.
The fund’s successful mutual aid effort demonstrated how meaningful self-governed solutions create more stable communities.
The direct disbursement of cash donations is one form of mutual aid, a community-based model of collective coordination to meet each other’s needs. Mutual aid was especially effective during the COVID-19 pandemic for immediate financial relief when government mandates, such as shelter-in-place policies, devastated low-income workers. “The first funds were from one family—$10,000 that we distributed to families as $500 [payments],” explains cofounder Azucena Castañon. The seven cofounders independently connected with neighbors in need, solicited short applications from families via email, and then met virtually to discuss and unanimously approve each request for cash assistance. They developed a nonhierarchical self- governance model, where outreach was conducted in person or via phone, and envelopes with cash were delivered directly, so that recipients could access funds without delay.
FSMV was able to both disperse funds and scale quickly by collaborating with the Los Altos Mountain View Community Foundation (LAMVCF), a larger, local charity that supports historically marginalized and underrepresented voices. LAMVCF runs a nonprofit incubator program that supports community-led projects with fiscal sponsorship and administrative support. The partnership rendered the fund “a little more formal” in their outreach to donors, Melo says, enabling the fund to raise an initial $50,000 without the need to formally organize as a nonprofit. LAMVCF also offered logistical assistance, such as accepting donations and writing checks, while the fund worked independently as a group of seven volunteers to solicit applications from the community and democratically distribute aid to families in $500 to $1,000 disbursements.
In 2022, the fund marked a stand-out fundraising achievement. When the Mountain View City Council sought to reallocate $3 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding, the FSMV leadership testified that they were uniquely positioned to bridge a gap in public goods provision and credibly deliver cash assistance to working-class Latino residents. At first, some legislators were skeptical. “In the beginning, when we asked for the money, the city said we were not credible enough to do all this work,” recalls FSMV cofounder Sonia Sequieros. The fund built up their organizational capacity and proved their efficacy by quickly raising thousands of dollars in private donations and successfully redistributing cash assistance to underserved families. Further, Salazar explains how at city council hearings, sharing testimonies from the one-on-one interviews highlighted “the importance of knowing the stories of so many families that were suffering.”
After months of advocacy, the city of Mountain View chose the fund to be one of three local organizations awarded $1 million in FY 2021-22 appropriations as direct cash assistance. By 2023, the city arranged for over $1.8 million in public funding to FSMV to distribute for COVID-19 financial relief. This redistributive effort helped hundreds of local working-class families during a time of great need. Melo remembers that once, when delivering a check to a family, the father “started to cry because he said that he didn’t expect to receive such help.”
Housing for All
Although localities across the country are experimenting with affordable housing solutions, the status quo is insufficient for families at risk of displacement. The pandemic, repealed eviction moratoriums, and inflation have all accelerated the housing crisis. “Families had to hope to be able to continue their rhythm of life with their children in schools, with their cultural spaces, with their housing spaces, with their community spaces,” cofounder Nadia Mora explains. “They tried to stay and live even if they were two or three families in one place.”
According to the cofounders’ interviews with neighbors, Mountain View’s working-class families pay approximately 70 to 80 percent of their income on rent, with many families living together in small apartments. New developments, even those marketed as affordable, are out of price range for families who currently reside in the area, according to the leaders’ own experience and conversations with neighbors. Thus, the MVCLT leaders are advocating for the preservation and acquisition of existing affordable housing options, rather than new construction of units.
MVCLT plans to purchase a 10- to 15-unit building and rent apartments at below-market rates to local working-class families within the next two years. The nonprofit’s fundraising strategy builds upon the FSMV’s model of prioritizing community voices and personal testimonies from their own lived experiences as those personally at-risk of displacement. In this way, the fund’s successful mutual aid effort established credibility and demonstrated how meaningful self- governed solutions create more stable communities. “
Rents are not going to go down, and they are not going to go down at the prices we can buy,” Melo says. “The only thing is to have this type of controllable housing so that we can continue to be a part of this social fabric and not be evicted.”
Editor’s note: A generative AI tool (ChatGPT 4.0) was used to assist in the translation of the interview questions prepared by the author from English into Spanish. Sonix AI was used to assist with translating the audio files of the interviews into Spanish transcripts and then into English. This article has been re-printed with permission from Stanford Social Innovation Review, Copyright SSIR 2025.