One week after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, the Fair Housing Act (FHA) was passed. The FHA protects homebuyers and renters from discrimination by sellers or landlords due to their race, color, national origin, religion, gender, disability and familial status. Additional protections against housing discrimination are provided by the California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA).
Project Sentinel is a fair housing agency whose mission is to ensure that the protections promised by the FHA and FEHA are kept. Whether its investigating possible race or gender discrimination due to discriminatory comments made by a property manager; ensuring that families with children are not burdened by overly restrictive child supervision rules; preventing the eviction of a survivor of domestic violence; making sure that recent immigrants have an equal opportunity to gain housing; or requesting that a disabled tenant be allowed to keep an emotional service animal; PS has and stands ready to assist Sacramentans in exercising their fair housing rights.
PS, together with its partners the Renters' Helpline and the Legal Services of Northern California, provides an array of services to the residents of Sacramento County and the City of West Sacramento. These services may include educating housing actors about their fair housing rights and responsibilities, conciliating fair housing disputes, or representing aggrieved tenants and homebuyers in legal proceedings. PS also investigates claims of housing discrimination through testing and surveying of properties.
Project Sentinel was founded in 1971 by a group of leaders from the corporate, educational and labor communities, as well as community fair housing advocates. The agency has grown steadily and is now the largest fair housing advocacy agency in Northern California serving an overall population of 3.5 million. Project Sentinel has offices located in Sacramento, Modesto, Fremont, Gilroy, Redwood City, Milpitas, and Santa Clara.
Project Sentinel's mission is to develop and promote fairness and equality of housing for all persons and to advocate peaceful resolution of disputes for community welfare and harmony.
Our most pressing needs are funding/donations that will help cover operating costs for our Fair Housing program and program improvements that our grants do not cover. This would allow for organizational capacity building.
Our fair housing program could greatly benefit from funds that increase our capacity for advocacy, community engagement, and education. Donor contributions would be funneled into investigating housing discrimination and supporting tenants' in asserting their rights.
As our fair housing program continues to grow as an agency, allowing us to expand our service areas, we have new needs that restricted government grants don't allow for. Funds for development efforts, support staff in our numerous satellite offices, profession development for our staff to ensure we are retaining talented people who will continue serving communities in need, would be greatly appreciated.
We could greatly benefit from an improvement in our technology department including funding for a new mapping tool, a new projector. We'd also be able to upgrade to our database and allow us to access media monitoring tools, legal databases for advocacy, and website updates.
Project Sentinel's primary method for determining whether housing discrimination has occurred starts with testing and surveying. But because we have a limited amount of trained testers and surveyors, it creates a bottleneck in our system and slows down our investigation. With more volunteer resources, we could expedite the investigation and be able to address more claims more efficiently.
Organization name
Project Sentinel Fair Housing Center
other names
PS
Tax id (EIN)
77-0266612
Mission Category
Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy
Operating Budget
$1,000,001-$5 million
Organization Need
Funding: Unrestricted, Funding: Program, Funding: Other, Technology, Volunteers
Address
1010 Hurley Way Suite 500