Downtown Streets Team brings businesses, communities, and homeless people together to create and maintain a clean, safe downtown district. Homeless people who work in the program earn the resources they need to get off the streets.

The program rewards those who want to help themselves by providing mentoring, job search skills meetings (resume building, mock interviews, etc.), housing placement, and other essential services. Participants clean our downtown area or maintain one of our contracts in exchange for food/shelter vouchers. In addition, our innovative model provides low-cost janitorial/maintenance services to local government and partnered non-profit through one of our contracts, such as our kitchen/janitorial contract with the Opportunity Center in Palo Alto. As July 2010, 80 participants have moved on to regular employment and 70 have been permanently housed. Earlier this year Downtown Streets Team was awarded the Tall Tree Award for Outstanding Non-Profit of 2010 by the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce.

The primary team is based in Palo Alto and the model has been successfully duplicated in San Jose and Gilroy and franchised out to Daytona Beach, F.L. Maintaining and growing our local impact remains our primary goal yet franchising the model nationally is a long-term goal. To find out more or learn how to help, please check out our website, www.streetsteam.org