Summary
What do they do? La Casa de las Madres, EIN 94-2330864, provides emergency shelter, community advocacy and counseling, police-response follow-up, statewide crisis lines, supportive-housing services and prevention. Its 2025 report describes 1,384 Bay Area survivors of all ages receiving direct services. More
Why this approach interests us
- Safety-focused advocacy and practical support may reduce abuse and improve short-term health. External intensive post-shelter advocacy trials provide some support for this pathway.
Our main reservations
- The external intervention differs from La Casa's mixed services. Additionality, advocacy dose, geography and the finite utility bridge are judgments; a 5%-weight favorable world supplies 86.9% of all-beneficiary expected net benefit.
What do you get for your dollar?
A $100,000 ordinary whole-organization gift produces 0.044061 signed prior-weighted Bay QALYs, or $22,695,319 per 10. Across all modeled beneficiaries, the estimate is $22,460,767 donor cash and $26,728,312 modeled gross resources per 10 QALYs. Observed QALYs and verified marginal capacity remain unknown. Inspect the model, assumptions and scenarios.
- bay whole gift
- $22.70M — $22,695,319 per 10 signed prior-weighted Bay QALYs; residence shares are assumptions
- all beneficiaries
- $22.46M — $22,460,767 donor cash per 10 modeled QALYs, not the Bay ranking field
- modeled gross
- $26.73M — all-beneficiary resource sensitivity; verified complete gross resources are unavailable
- giving verdict
- HOLD — no verified marginal capacity or observed QALY estimate
1. What do they do?
La Casa de las Madres, EIN 94-2330864, provides emergency shelter, community advocacy and counseling, police-response follow-up, statewide crisis lines, supportive-housing services and prevention. Its 2025 report describes 1,384 Bay Area survivors of all ages receiving direct services.
Connect with safety and support
Survivors reach crisis response, shelter, a community office or partner co-locations.
Receive appropriate advocacy
Only an assumed adult-eligible fraction receiving an intensive-advocacy-equivalent dose enters the health bridge.
Count finite additional benefit
Apply funding additionality and a signed finite QALY effect; other contacts and overlapping programs are not separately added.
Scope of this review. All FY2025 IRS expense of $4,560,661 is charged. The 1,384 direct-service umbrella is non-additive: 885 community-office users, 815 co-location users, 231 sheltered people, 6,571 shelter service-days, 2,226 police contacts and 6,151 calls/texts are not summed. This retains whole-organization costs while leaving non-advocacy health pathways unquantified, not proven zero.
2. Monitoring and information sharing
La Casa's mixed-age direct-service population
Organization-reported FY2025 activity and finances. Annual report gives a broad 1,384 Bay survivor umbrella alongside overlapping service counts and self-reported outcomes.
Our assessment. Outputs establish delivery, not causal QALYs. Do not sum contacts or interpret success surveys as effects versus a counterfactual.
278 former shelter residents receiving ten weeks of advocacy or control
Randomized trial, Sullivan and Bybee. Authors report reduced violence and better quality-of-life-related outcomes across two-year follow-up, with 95% retained.
Our assessment. An intensive post-shelter intervention is not La Casa's whole portfolio. Present-day dose, adult eligibility and response remain uncertain.
Women experiencing intimate partner abuse in varied settings
Systematic review of randomized and quasi-randomized advocacy trials. Intensive advocacy may improve some short-term quality-of-life and abuse outcomes; evidence is heterogeneous, often low quality, and several outcomes include no benefit.
Our assessment. The NNT≈8 at 24 months is not observed QALY gain or proof of two continuous years without abuse. Null and harm priors remain explicit.
Modeled abused and not-abused states, not La Casa participants
UK decision-model state utilities. Utilities used include 0.63 abused/unidentified, 0.65 seeing an advocate and 0.85 not abused.
Our assessment. Combining the 0.22 gap with an advocacy response rate and finite duration is an analyst heuristic; the full gap is not the measured effect of seeing an advocate.
136 women in nine Dutch shelters
Randomized critical-time-intervention trial. At nine months PTSD improved, but primary quality of life and several re-abuse and mental-health outcomes were null.
Our assessment. Different intervention and setting; supports caution rather than supplying a La Casa coefficient.
La Casa housing support and shelter programs
City executed-agreement reporting and draft funding recommendations. Documented Verona support agreement extends through June2027; separate FY2026–27 shelter support is proposed.
Our assessment. Distinguish executed baseline agreements from proposals; neither demonstrates gift-triggered additional capacity.
3. Qualitative assessment
Safety-focused advocacy and practical support may reduce abuse and improve short-term health. External intensive post-shelter advocacy trials provide some support for this pathway.
Key reservations
- The modeled result is unfavorable and is not a recommendation to give.
- 86.9% of all-beneficiary expected net QALYs comes from a 5%-weight favorable prior.
- No observed La Casa QALY effect, verified advocacy-dose mix or marginal funding offer was found.
- Public funding, other donors and reserves complicate additionality; assets do not establish unrestricted liquid availability.
- The two-year health bridge assumes persistence not established by a 24-month outcome measurement.
- Bay and SF shares are unmeasured residence priors; all costs are retained even for unquantified services.
- In-kind reconciliation and complete external resource costs remain unknown.
Benefits not included in our estimate
- Mortality prevention and lifetime effects
- Separate additive hotline, police-response, shelter, prevention and co-location QALYs
- Child and caregiver health effects beyond the modeled adult advocacy pathway
- Financial savings, housing value and taxpayer savings as QALYs
4. What do you get for your dollar?
Signed expected Bay cost: $22,695,319 per 10 QALYs
Compute each joint scenario's signed QALYs, weight health outcomes, then divide the whole gift by the weighted result. Do not average prices or discard harmful worlds.
A better life is our comparison unit of 10 additional quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), potentially spread across people. These are uncertain estimates, not measured returns or verified donation offers.
How we calculate the estimate
CENTRAL ADVOCACY PATHWAY: QBay = (100000 / 4560661) × 1384 × .70 adult-eligible × .20 full advocacy dose × .15 funding additionality × .05 finite QALY × .98 Bay share
Central Bay QALYs = 0.031226; all-beneficiary central donor cost = $31,383,574 per 10 QALYs. The prior-weighted Bay headline is not this central scenario.
Model inputs and assumptions
- Whole annual expense
- $4,560,661 FY2025 IRS (range: Annual report: $4,525,216). No overhead or non-advocacy cost removed. Reported $95,586 in-kind input is not assumed included in IRS expense or mechanically added. Reported accounting; reconciliation incomplete.
- Broad direct-service umbrella
- 1,384 (range: 885 community-office subset diagnostic). Mixed ages and services; overlapping outputs are not added. Organization-reported, not a verified unique-dose census.
- Adult eligibility and full advocacy dose
- 70% × 20% central (range: Adult share 50–85%; dose 5–50%). External intensive post-shelter advocacy evidence cannot be assigned to every person, child, call or brief contact. Analyst priors.
- Funding additionality
- 15% central (range: 0–40%). Public funding, other gifts, reserves and operational capacity may replace or constrain a gift's additional services. Analyst prior; no marginal offer.
- Finite QALY bridge
- 0.05 per full advocacy equivalent (range: −0.02 harm to 0.15 favorable). 1/8 responders × (0.85−0.63) modeled annual utility gap × 2 years = 0.055, rounded down to 0.05. A 24-month abuse endpoint does not establish continuous two-year remission. Advocate-state utility is only 0.65. The 0.15 tail is a wide judgment, not measured benefit; no mortality credit. Unvalidated cross-study heuristic.
- Recipient geography
- 98% Bay / 85% SF central (range: Bay 90–99%; nested SF 70–95%). Annual report supports Bay presence, not exact residence shares. Statewide hotline receives no direct health credit. Analyst residence priors.
- Joint scenario weights
- 5/25/20/25/20/5% (range: Harm / funding-null / evidence-null / cautious / central / favorable). Null and negative outcomes are retained. Favorable contribution is 86.9% of all-beneficiary weighted net QALYs. Subjective priors, not statistical confidence.
- Gross-resource multiplier
- 1.15 central (range: 1.10–1.50). Intended to encompass unreconciled in-kind and unpriced partner inputs. Verified complete gross resource cost remains unavailable. Sensitivity, not complete accounting.
Illustrative $100,000 ordinary gift
- harm: Negative Bay health outcome. 5% weight; −0.011470 Bay QALYs. Nonpositive outcomes have no positive cost-effectiveness ratio.
- funding-null: Zero additional health. 25% weight; funding additionality zero. Full gift cost remains.
- evidence-null: Zero health effect. 20% weight; the transferred advocacy effect is zero.
- cautious: 0.000341 Bay QALYs. 25% weight; low adult eligibility, dose and funding additionality.
- central: 0.031226 Bay QALYs. 20% weight; 0.05 finite QALY per full advocacy equivalent. All-beneficiary central price is $31,383,574 per 10.
- favorable: 0.766096 Bay QALYs. 5% weight; 0.15 finite QALY per equivalent. All-beneficiary favorable price is $1,292,264 per 10, not a quoted donation offer.
- favorable contribution removed: $171,517,256 per 10 all-beneficiary QALYs. Original-weight favorable contribution is removed without renormalization; this is the saved model diagnostic, not a Bay ratio.
Uncertainty. The finite bridge combines heterogeneous advocacy and state-utility evidence. Duration, response, eligibility and dose are not measured La Casa effects. No mortality, lifetime or separate additive shelter/prevention benefit is credited. Linear gift scaling is an accounting assumption, not verified large-gift absorption capacity.
5. Funding and previous grants
Establish a priced additional service or preservation plan, its funding counterfactual, unduplicated recipients, advocacy dose and finite health outcomes before recommending a gift.
No verified marginal funding offer. FY2025 IRS revenue is $5,062,993, surplus $502,332 and net assets $13,476,875; assets are not all current unrestricted cash. A city executed-agreement report lists Verona Hotel support services through June2027, total NTE $1,332,681, supporting 65 housing units. A draft FY2026–27 plan recommends $165,000 for shelter/case management; final executed award was not verified. These are baseline funding records, not prices for additional advocacy. Public funding and private gifts overlap; no entire grant is subtracted from whole expense. Promotional $100 shelter-night examples are not binding marginal prices.
This review does not establish a verified marginal funding offer or a complete history of grants.
Opens the organization’s giving page. A general donation may not fund the specific activity modeled here; confirm allocation with the recipient.
6. Sources
- FY2025 annual report. La Casa de las Madres. Official annual report. Published: FY2025; publication date unspecified; retrieved: 2026-09-11.
- La Casa filing index, EIN 94-2330864. IRS via ProPublica. Tax-filing mirror. Published: FY2025 filing; filed 2026-02-28 per index; retrieved: 2026-09-10.
- FY2024 financial statements. La Casa de las Madres / auditor. Official audited financial statements. Published: FY2024; issue date not recorded; retrieved: 2026-09-10.
- Official giving page. La Casa de las Madres. Official donation route. Published: Undated; retrieved: 2026-09-11.
- Intensive advocacy randomized trial. Sullivan and Bybee / PubMed. Primary randomized study. Published: 1999; retrieved: 2026-09-10.
- Advocacy interventions for women experiencing intimate partner abuse. Cochrane / PubMed Central. Systematic review. Published: Date not recorded in accepted source map; retrieved: 2026-09-10.
- Intimate-partner-violence utility-state decision model. PubMed Central. Decision-model utility calibration. Published: Date not recorded in accepted source map; retrieved: 2026-09-10.
- Dutch critical time intervention randomized trial. International Journal of Public Health. Primary randomized study. Published: 2017; retrieved: 2026-09-10.
- FY2025–26 Q1 executed-agreement report. San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Government executed-agreement report. Published: 2025-10-31; retrieved: 2026-09-11.
- Draft FY2026–27 funding recommendations. City and County of San Francisco. Proposed government funding, not executed award. Published: FY2026–27 draft; exact issue date not recorded; retrieved: 2026-09-11.
Annual expenses: years and sources
Average annual expenses (three consecutive fiscal years): $4,447,027. Organization size is separate from the modeled cost-effectiveness of a donation.
La Casa De Las Madres
Form 990/990-EZ reported whole-entity expenses; includes program, administration and fundraising costs, but excludes any costs netted against revenue.
Original returns checked for legal identity, full-year period and total expenses. Latest three linked original returns.