Susan Bailey still vividly remembers the first time she hosted a family in need of emergency housing. It was 2017, and she had just renovated a property near her home in Colorado with the idea of adding it to her growing portfolio of Airbnb rentals. One evening, she got a call out of the blue from someone at Airbnb Open Homes, as Airbnb’s program for housing people in crisis was then known. 

“It was eight o’clock on a Thursday night,” Bailey says. Airbnb asked if she would be willing to welcome a refugee family from Iraq, arriving at midnight. That same year, Airbnb pointedly ran ads welcoming refugees in the face of President Trump’s ban on immigrants and refugees from majority-Muslim nations. 

Bailey didn’t know anything about her prospective guests, and there were still items left on her property’s renovation punch list. But she said yes. Four hours later, the family was at her door. 

In the years that have followed, Bailey has hosted families facing crises of all sorts and sizes, including the wildfires that have plagued communities in Colorado and California, where she also manages short-term rentals. “In many cases, in the beginning, we didn’t even know if Airbnb would fund their stays,” she says. “It was pretty scrappy.”

Those scrappy days are now gone. org, an independent nonprofit, in 2020. Today, it’s making an even bigger commitment to the problem of emergency housing. “We were just getting a huge amount of demand,” Brian Chesky, Airbnb cofounder and CEO, says of the decision to create a new funding model for the nonprofit.

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