Ninety-three homeless families will find themselves in temporary homes within the next two years, thanks in part to $1.7 million in grants from the privately funded Sound Families program.

The Gates Foundation started this program last summer with $40 million, the largest-ever private donation to help combat homelessness. The money will help double the Puget Sound's amount of transitional housing. Within the next three years, the program aims to add another 1,560 transitional units, as well as provide funding for tenant support services such as job training, counseling, and daycare.

The new transitional units - where families are expected to stay approximately two years in the effort to move from homelessness to permanent housing - are hoped to provide much-needed relief to over-crowded emergency shelters. Last year, homeless people living in Washington were refused shelter 139,290 times; 63,000 of those times were in King County alone, and over half of those refused were women and children, according to the state's Emergency Shelter Assistance Program.

Out of 10 organizations that applied, the successful grants and projects included the following:

$735,850 for the Low Income Housing Institute to build 15 units of transitional housing in a 51-unit Meadowbrook View complex in Seattle, complete with services such as food banks, daycare, and medical and employment services provided by the Seattle Emergency Housing Services;

$406,135 for the Hearing, Speech and Deafness Center to provide 10 transitional housing units in the new, 96-unit Views at Madison in Seattle, complete with services for families with disabilities provided by the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation;

$290,000 for Vision House to build a home in Renton for 12 families of single mothers and their newborns, with services provided by Vision House;

$189,000 for Housing Hope to build transitional housing for eight young mothers or pregnant women in Everett, along with an educational system called The College of Hope, designed to teach both work and parenting skills;

$113,700 for St. Stephen's Housing Association to build 12 transitional units for low-income families in Auburn, in partnership with Catholic Community Services and developer Common Ground.

All of the projects approved in this first round of grant awards were chosen because they were already significantly underway, with building design and most other funding in place, if not building permits already in hand, explained Seattle's Office of Housing coordinator for Sound Families, Paul Carlson.

The Office of Housing - the largest single provider of grants for low-income and transitional housing in the region, thanks in large part to the Seattle housing levy - is coordinating the distribution of the money. To do so, the Office of Housing has reallocated roughly $120,000 from its existing budget to put towards funding Carl-son's and other staffers' work.

Sound Families has taken care to make sure its money is distributed across the entire Puget Sound region. Government officials and service providers from King, Snohomish, and Pierce counties, as well as Everett, Tacoma, and Seattle, have come together to review the projects and then provide recommendations to the Gates Foundation, which makes the ultimate funding decisions.

However, even with Gates Foundation money, the developers still have to come up with 80 percent of the rest of the cost of building or renovating the new transitional units. Vision House, for example, has more than 30 additional sponsors, including several churches, the Boeing Company, the Windermere Foundation, and the Medina Foundation.

In addition, the money provided by the Sound Families program for services - a maximum of $1,500 per unit over three years - goes only a small way in providing the kinds of extensive help these families need. All of the projects approved this round requested and received the maximum amount of service funding for each of their units. But of the $1.7 million given, only $405,000 will be used toward this end. This limit is compounded by the fact that funds for services are much scarcer than funds for buildings.

Yet the commitment of the Gates Foundation should hopefully inspire other private sources to step up, noted Seattle Mayor Paul Schell at the press conference announcing the awards February 12.

"We have the talent and the resources," he said. "We need the commitment and the will."