Opinion: Military-Serving Nonprofits Are Part of San Diego’s Safety Net. Let’s Treat Them That Way.

Lu is a San Diego–based defense and public-sector program leader. He serves on the Board of Management of the Armed Services YMCA San Diego and is an Executive MPA candidate at Cornell University focusing on Program and Non-profit management.

San Diego spends a lot of time talking about how to keep people from falling into crisis. Voice of San Diego has covered homelessness prevention, how quickly help should arrive and what happens when city and county systems do not line up.

Those stories make one thing clear: early help is cheaper than emergency help.

There is a group of families living here who fit that lesson perfectly, but they are rarely named in local plans. These are active-duty families, recently separated service members and the nonprofits that serve them.

These families are San Diego families. They use our schools, parks and libraries. Many of them moved here without relatives nearby. When something goes wrong, they do not go back to another state to solve it. They look for help here.

The first place they find help is often a military-serving nonprofit. Those groups provide food support, childcare relief, school supplies, counseling and a place to connect with other families who are going through the same things. When that help works, the family stays stable. That means they do not enter the same cycles of homelessness and crisis that the city is trying to reduce.

Right now, San Diego does not plan for these nonprofits the same way it plans for other parts of the safety net. Funding can be short term. They are sometimes invited into conversations after decisions are made. That might make sense in a city with a small military footprint, but it does not make sense in a region that depends on the Navy, Marine Corps and defense work and that welcomes thousands of new military families every year.

If we believe in prevention, then the organizations that prevent military families from hitting crisis should be treated as essential.

Here is what that could look like.

First, name the population. When the city and county publish plans on homelessness prevention, family services, behavioral health or community well being, military and military-adjacent households should be listed among the groups we are trying to keep stable. If we can name seniors, foster youth and people leaving institutions, we can name military families too.

Second, bring the nonprofits in at the start. Military-serving organizations see stress points early. They know when units are rotating, when spouses are isolated and when a federal or benefit change is about to create hardship. That is important local information that should inform local planning.

Third, make support predictable. These groups often braid federal, philanthropic and local dollars to keep programs going. If local government wants them to keep families out of crisis, then it should offer predictable agreements the same way it does for other core providers. Prevention works best when people can count on it.

Fourth, count the diversions. If a military family in San Diego stayed housed and stable because an early intervention worked, that is a win for the whole region. We should count it. Let us measure how many families never needed a shelter bed or an emergency move because a nonprofit helped them sooner.

This is not a request to shift city money away from people who are already unhoused. It is a request to recognize that in a military town, keeping military families stable is part of the overall strategy. When those families do well, pressure on city and county systems is lighter. When they do not, we all pay for it anyway — just later and at a higher cost.

San Diego says it supports the military. One way to prove it is to treat the organizations that hold up military families as part of the safety net we already value.

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