When smartphones were first introduced, I remember thinking that I didn’t need or want a phone that was also a watch, music player, camera, or some other gadget. Today, I can’t imagine not having a smartphone with access to an endless array of apps.
Given that this game-changing technology came from Silicon Valley, it’s not surprising that we think about our community foundation, which I head, much like a smartphone. We offer a broad array of guidance and tools for individuals and corporations seeking philanthropic solutions to challenging problems at home, across the nation, and around the world. And we make it easy for them to get what they want when they want it.
That was what the boards of Peninsula Community Foundation and Community Foundation Silicon Valley had in mind when they came together a decade ago to create a community foundation that “would meet donor partners where they are and support their personal definition of building community — locally, nationally, and around the globe.”
This would be a radical idea for anyplace other than Silicon Valley. After all, most community foundations have a tight focus on making grants in a well-defined geographic area. By contrast, Silicon Valley encompasses many different cities, each with its own identity and nonprofit ecosystem.
Silicon Valley Community Foundation is challenging the notion of what it means to be a community foundation, an idea that was pioneered more than a century ago in Cleveland. All of us who work in community foundations have been grappling with how best to transform the century-old idea into institutions that serve today’s and tomorrow’s needs, and we are all coming up with different answers that work for our communities.
For example, people who live in New York care about and want to support nonprofit organizations important to them in the places where they grew up and the places where they are working or raising families — and yet they might still care deeply about causes that affect people who live across the country and around the world.
Yet somehow the notion that Silicon Valley’s community foundation, by making it easy for donors to give everywhere, is betraying its promise to its local community has begun getting traction. That view is parochial at best. The New York Times, for example, provides local, national, and worldwide coverage — one doesn’t negate the others.
Many of the criticisms of our work were crystallized in two pieces in Stanford Social Innovation Review’s fall issue — and that led to a blog post by Phil Buchanan, head of the Center for Effective Philanthropy. (Mr. Buchanan is a regular columnist for The Chronicle.)
Because the Stanford articles maintain that only the traditional community foundation model is valid, it’s important to put on the record what we have learned in our first decade of envisioning a totally new way to operate.
What Works Differs
The most important lesson is that what works in one community won’t necessarily work in another. It’s not surprising, though, that other community foundations in technology centers — such as Seattle Foundation and Foundation for the Carolinas — are following similar paths. Listening to what the donors in our community say about what services they want is a big reason why we have raised $8.3 billion and become the nation’s largest community foundation.
Yet the two pieces in the Stanford journal, “The Charity That Big Tech Built,” written by Marc Gunther (a veteran journalist who often reports for The Chronicle) and an editor’s note from Eric Nee, “Putting Community First,” rely on outdated notions that community foundations are successful only if they focus solely on a limited geographic community.
That would be impossible in Silicon Valley, because even people who live in the region don’t agree on its boundaries. Instead, Silicon Valley is best understood as a state of mind that embraces innovation and entrepreneurship across a wide, diverse, interconnected region of people from around the world. And that’s what must be at the heart of our community foundation.
But Mr. Nee insists “the primary purpose of a community foundation DAF [donor-advised fund] should be that most of the money will eventually go to a nonprofit serving its community, not sent abroad.”
Not only is that thinking shortsighted in a publication advancing social innovation, but it also misrepresents the facts about how our foundation’s grants are distributed.
Of the $1.3 billion that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation granted last year, $812 million went to nonprofits in the nine-county Bay Area, $48 million to nonprofits across California, $410 million to nonprofits nationally, and only $18 million to nonprofits abroad.
Over 50 percent of the people who live in Silicon Valley were born outside of California, and one-third of them are foreign-born. Why is it surprising that their charitable giving would reflect this? Why shouldn’t a community foundation created to serve Silicon Valley residents recognize that most have connections to other communities? In a region known as the global epicenter for innovation and connectivity, should its community foundation be bound by a fixed geography?
Strong Local Mission
Critics like Mr. Nee and those quoted by Mr. Gunther might not like that we give outside Northern California, but none of the pieces about us seem even to understand our local mission.
We were created, in part, to respond to regional problems facing dozens of local governments that have competing interests and serve racially and ethnically diverse communities. Two of the big counties in Silicon Valley, San Mateo and Santa Clara, encompass 54 incorporated and unincorporated communities with their own local governments, hundreds of nonprofit organizations, and a broad array of concerns ranging from urban to rural to farming to land and water conservation.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of people commute from one distinct local community, bypassing several others, often crossing county lines, to work in other distinctly local communities. Inexplicably, absent from the discussion in the Stanford pieces is any mention of how San Francisco, which is its own county, is inexorably intertwined with Silicon Valley on issues of housing, transportation, and economic development. That’s the case for many community foundations based just outside large urban centers. Communities like the Bay Area — for example, those in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut regions that border New York City — need to find ways to be flexible in thinking about geography.
In Silicon Valley, our foundation believes that solutions to the region’s growing housing crisis, income inequality, poor educational outcomes, and transportation gridlock will require public-policy solutions that cross local and county boundaries.
Advocacy and Policy
The strategy behind our public-policy work is the deeper question left unexplored by Mr. Nee and Mr. Gunther.
Most disappointing is that the authors seem unaware of how rare it is for any community foundation to engage in direct lobbying in support of legislation. They are so fixated on the idea that the only role of a community foundation is to make grants to nonprofit organizations they ignore that our foundation’s primary strategy is creating systems change through public policy. And the success we have had is a lesson for other foundations worried that their donors might not like such direct involvement in influencing public policy. Indeed, it is this success that brings us new donors and encourages our current donors to give more.
Silicon Valley Community Foundation has successfully championed new laws and regulations at the city, county, and state levels.
One such example, described by Mr. Gunther, was the foundation’s effort over three years to establish a state law preventing children entering ninth grade who had passed their eighth-grade math exams from being forced to repeat the same math course. African-American and Latino kids were far more likely to be subject to this practice, which was demoralizing and made it difficult for them to finish high school with the requisite math credits to attend college, thereby limiting their future income and prospects. Now, every year 500,000 children across the state will be treated fairly.
Similarly, Silicon Valley Community Foundation has championed restricting payday lenders, which charge interest rates as high as 450 percent. We and our nonprofit partners have helped pass 14 local ordinances restricting payday lending, helping to keep more money in the pockets of working poor people.
How did Mr. Gunther characterize our foundation’s public-policy work promoting educational and economic justice in the most complicated state in the nation with the seventh-largest economy in the world?
“These efforts are not trivial, but they are not terribly ambitious, either,” he wrote.
I wonder if he can find a community fund working on a more ambitious agenda — and succeeding.
Helping the Neediest
What else are we doing to uplift the lives of the most vulnerable?
We make grants to improve the life chances of poor kids in all neighborhoods and across multiple communities, not simply a single neighborhood in a single community. We make grants to nonprofits helping children in the farming community of Pescadero, where bottled water is being brought in daily because of contaminated pipes and where the children of undocumented immigrants worry that they or their parents may be deported.
We also make grants across San Mateo County, where the reading literacy of third graders is 50 percent. In that county, we are working with local education boards and 100 organizations on a project called the Big Lift to improve those statistics. And, because early-childhood development has been severely underfunded in California, Silicon Valley Community Foundation will be holding gubernatorial-candidate forums with nonprofit partners across the state to ensure this is a priority for the next governor.
Mr. Gunther also falsely suggests that our foundation has been unresponsive to Silicon Valley’s housing crisis. Yet the foundation has supported several successful ballot measures in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties that leveraged hundreds of millions annually for housing and transportation. We actively lobby the state legislature and have produced crucial research to inform policy decisions.
Silicon Valley Community Foundation is neither, as Mr. Nee suggests, “akin to Fidelity-Charitable” nor like any other community foundation. As hoped for by our founders, we aspire to be different.
Our foundation’s mission of allowing donors to define their community has led us to question much of the 100-year community-foundation orthodoxy. It explains why we think about community differently from other community foundations, engage in international grant making, provide corporations with back-office services, pursue community leadership by lobbying on difficult social-policy issues, and opened an office to serve individual and corporate donors on the East Coast. We are acutely aware that our actions have left some observers, both near and far, confused and confounded as Silicon Valley Community Foundation has decided to go down the road less traveled.
But as the management guru Peter Drucker once said, “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”