Better Angels, a nonprofit tackling Los Angeles homelessness, is working to deliver dignified, affordable housing at a third of the cost and time of conventional loans. Eviction-preventing microloans and tech tools empower the organization’s outreach workers. Founded by tech titan Adam Miller, who grew Cornerstone OnDemand in his apartment into a global giant before selling it to confront society’s deepest challenges, the nonprofit rejects the notion of homelessness as inevitable in one of the world’s richest nations by harnessing innovative capitalism and compassion to prove that real change is possible.
Miller’s journey began when he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he volunteered with organizations that aided the homeless. A native of Flanders, New Jersey, he continued his volunteer work after moving across the country to pursue a law degree and an MBA at the University of California, Los Angeles.
After graduation, Miller worked in a boutique law firm. Later, he launched his own tech company, Cornerstone OnDemand, whose AI-powered workforce agility platform, Cornerstone Galaxy, helps companies manage and develop their employees through integrated talent management by focusing heavily on skills development, performance, and compliance via learning experiences to help increase access to education for adults.
Despite his success in growing the firm to 3,000 employees spread over 25 different countries, with 75 million subscribers, Miller says, “I just always felt like, in [this] day and age in America, we should not have homelessness . . . . We’re too good and too wealthy a country to be having that on our streets.”
Miller involved himself in nonprofits. He served as chairman of Team Rubicon, a nonprofit focusing on providing disaster relief, and merged two different nonprofits—Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network and the Food Allergy Initiative—to create an organization known as FARE, one of the largest food allergy nonprofits worldwide.
Miller sold Cornerstone OnDemand four years ago to private equity firm Clearlake Capital Group for roughly $5.2 billion and decided—alongside his wife, Staci—to concentrate on giving back to the community. He volunteered with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. He became frustrated with “the ecosystem,” however, and contemplated focusing his efforts on other community endeavors.
His son helped change his mind.
“I was thinking about working on other things [as] I was driving my son home from school, and I realized [that] we passed three encampments on the way home,” Miller says. “I realized that he didn’t even notice the encampments at all. They were almost invisible to him. Then I started thinking, what are we teaching our kids? For all the other feelings you might have about the homeless issue, you don’t want a generation of people [who] don’t care about other humans.”
After Miller mentioned the incident to his wife, they immediately formulated the idea of launching Better Angels. The nonprofit, which has 30 employees and a $300 million investment fund, is currently fundraising. It was conceived with the goal of using a “holistic” approach when it comes to fighting homelessness. Miller says that they took the time to factor in what would be needed to make the organization a success at fighting what he calls the city’s “most intractable problem.”
“We spent about a year and a half doing primary and secondary research on homelessness to understand what was working; what was not working; [and] why, given that L.A. had spent so much money and time and resources on homelessness, was the problem getting worse,” Miller says. He and his team pondered “What was happening in other cities, what was happening in other countries, and how might the problem be addressed. The result of that research was the genesis of Better Angels.”
The company—which has more than a thousand volunteers, and a goal of reaching more than 10,000 volunteers—works to operate differently from its competitors. The objective is to construct affordable housing projects as expeditiously as possible and expand the organization into a means of helping the ecosystem but not have to rely on outside fundraising at the outset, Miller says.
As a result, Miller and his wife decided to self-fund Better Angels. He says that taking this step let them work speedily and proved beneficial, because they were able to assemble their team “without having to compromise, based on fundraising needs.” Doing so also enabled the organization to yield results that led to invaluable public support.
Better Angels currently has two privately financed affordable housing projects underway: one is a 51-unit property in South Los Angeles; the other, a 72-unit modular development in Westchester, near Los Angeles International Airport. Although the cost to build such projects can exceed $800,000 per unit in the city and can take as long as seven years to construct, Better Angels seeks to build developments in “a third of [that] time and [at] a third of the price, and still deliver dignified, effective, affordable housing to people in need,” according to Miller. The cost for the two developments is under $300,000 per unit.
“What we’re trying to do is prove . . . that the private sector can make money in the affordable housing arena,” Miller says.
The nonprofit aims to build the two projects in 30 months. Miller also foresees constructing larger projects in the future—up to 200 units per development. Better Angels also has an affordable housing real estate fund, a wholly owned subsidiary of the nonprofit. About half of the fund is devoted to working with other investors and developers to aid them at being likewise successful.
André Bueno—co-chair of the ULI LA Homelessness Initiative Council, a member of the ULI Los Angeles Young Leaders Group, and the chief investment officer and director of housing at Better Angels—helps to educate staff at the nonprofit about the ins and outs of commercial real estate. He says the organization’s focus, when it comes to its projects, is to work with budding developers. “A lot of the work that we’re doing at Better Angels is really trying to build that emerging developer class,” Bueno says.
Miller says that Better Angels aims to build projects “with an 8 percent preferred return and a 14-plus percent net [internal rate of return] for the investors, even though it’s all affordable housing, focused exclusively on net new development.”
The organization also works to stave off homelessness by offering microloans to local residents who fall behind in paying their rent or utilities. The money is paid directly to the landlord or the utility company, up to $2,500, with no fees, no interest, no collateral, and no guarantors, according to Miller. Applicants must already be earning less than 50 percent of area median income, have received an eviction notice, and be able to provide proof of a “demonstrable financial shock,” which could be a car accident or an injury, among other factors.
“What we have found is that, if we’re able to step in relatively soon within the first three to six months of the issue [arising], we’re able to get them back on track,” Miller says.
The organization recognizes that it is at the forefront of a different kind of approach. Of utmost importance to Miller is a focus on results and inclusion of as many players as possible to make the broadest impact.
“We’re not trying to do what other people are doing,” Miller explains. “We’re trying to supplement or enable what other people are doing. Our technology, for example, is not to be used by our team but rather by all the outreach workers . . . employed by the city and the county, and [by] the other nonprofits that are working in this space. We want to make their people more effective by giving them modern tools and technology to be more effective in the field and in their work.”
