Since 1987, Alpha Project has been committed to providing meaningful opportunities to men and women motivated to change their lives through hard effort matched with the support of talented human service professionals. Over the past 25 years, Alpha Project has grown from a single program offering supportive employment to homeless men and women into an agency that spans all of San Diego County and reaches as far north as the Bay Area. While the agency has grown, its values have remained unchanged and with those values to guide it, today Alpha Project affects the lives of thousands of men and women each day, creating opportunities for disadvantaged individuals and families to lead lives of greater independence and self-determination.
Alpha Project’s social service programs offer support designed to address the full range of needs for men and women with substance abuse disorders, histories of incarceration and other involvement with law enforcement, mental illness, physical disability and other special needs. Participants in those programs include working age men and women from throughout San Diego County, representing the ethnic and cultural richness characteristic of the area. These key programs and other services, including transportation, end-of-life support, counseling and many others, are designed to combat the cycle of poverty and dependence on the front end, by addressing the causes and immediate consequences of that cycle for men and women left out of the mainstream.
While Alpha Project’s social service programs address the agency’s priorities on the front end, to close the widening gap at the back end that separates more and more working age adults and seniors from self-reliance, Alpha Project has amassed an inventory of permanent affordable housing totaling 698 units at six sites between Chula Vista in the south and Oakland in the north.
Alpha Project’s permanent housing developments have won numerous awards for excellence including recognition from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as “the best of the best” in affordable housing. In addition to high quality, safe, permanent housing at rents affordable to residents with low incomes, the various properties include such amenities as transportation shuttles, multi-station computer learning centers, community playgrounds and before and after-school programs.
In 2012, Alpha Project will assume control of a 73-unit complex for low-income individuals in Oakland and will commence operation of a 134-bed interim housing program at San Diego’s World Trade Center, on 6th Avenue, downtown. The program will be part of a multi-pronged approach to combating homeless at one site, in the heart of the city, an undertaking without precedent in San Diego. The full-scale program at the World Trade Center will serve thousands of San Diegans in need each year, offering primary and psychiatric health care, drug and alcohol treatment, job preparation, referral and placement support, interim and permanent housing, daily meals and additional services.
Alpha Project takes immense pride in how far it has come in the past quarter-century and it extends its thanks and the thanks of tens of thousands of men, women and children whose lives are forever transformed due to generous supporters like you who have made it all possible.