As president of Google.org, Jacquelline Fuller runs one of the nation’s biggest and most unusual corporate-philanthropy operations. The charitable grant-making arm of the internet search-engine giant gives about $100 million to charity each year; in 2016, $50 million went to organizations and programs in the Bay Area. (Google’s parent company had revenue of $90.3 billion in 2016; it is currently valued at $650 billion.)
So far in 2017, Google.org has made several multimillion-dollar charitable commitments. In February, it announced $11.5 million in new grants focused on racial equity and the criminal-justice system. The money will support the Center for Policing Equity, which tracks national statistics on police behavior, Impact Justice, whose restorative-justice project keeps young people of color out of juvenile detention, and two California nonprofits that gather and share data about courts and prisons, among other work. And last week, Google.org announced a $1 million commitment to create a Latino nonprofit accelerator with the Latino Community Foundation, which will provide support to organizations that serve and are led by Latinos in the Bay Area.
In July, it announced $50 million in new grants to nonprofits in the United States and Europe, helping people prepare for “the future of work.” The three areas of focus will be helping people find jobs, ensuring job training is effective, and improving job quality for low-wage earners.
Ms. Fuller, who spent seven years at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as deputy director of global health advocacy before joining Google.org in 2007, talked to The Chronicle about America’s corporate-giving culture, Google’s foray into grant making focused on racial justice, and “googliness,” the elusive quality that makes nonprofits stand out to the company as potential grantees. She also discussed the company’s commitment to allowing Googlers, as she refers to employees, to dedicate up to a fifth of their working hours to nonprofit projects.
The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How does your time in corporate philanthropy compare with your experience at the Gates Foundation?
I’d seen Bill and Melinda inject a sense of optimism into private philanthropy, that we could think much bigger and get a lot more done here.
In the area of corporate philanthropy, you didn’t see that same optimism or that same sense of, “Wow, we could really innovate how we’re thinking of doing things.”
If you look at the whole gamut of private giving in the United States, only about 5 percent of that comes from corporations. As Google co-founder Larry Page likes to say, most people will end up spending most of their time working for a company. So why can’t we think of our companies as a force for good in the world?
If companies gave 1 percent of revenue, we could raise an addition $60 billion each year. So we’re talking real resources. And if companies not only did that giving but aligned it with their core strengths, their values, what they know, who they are, what their employees do — and volunteer on site — that could have a huge multiplier effect.
How does Google.org set priorities?
One of the things I learned when I came to Google is that as an innovation company, we are a launch-and-innovate culture.
There are areas such as education and economic opportunity that resonate deeply with who we are as a company. Those are areas where we can double down and not only provide funding but also Googler volunteers. Or we can also align with what some of our products are doing in terms of reaching underserved markets. Those rose to the top as topics that were very natural to us.
We’re a team within Google — we’re fully funded by Google — but our mission as the philanthropy of Google is always to focus on the underserved, the most disadvantaged. As we look through that lens and we think about topics like lifelong learning and the future of work, one thing that becomes very clear is that there are systemic biases in the system. We also want to make sure we’re addressing systemic bias and things that are holding back whole cohorts of people.
That’s where our racial-justice initiative really came to focus in the last couple of years, where we’re looking in particular at the criminal-justice system and looking at how we as Google could help bring more understanding to that area.
Addressing systemic bias is not in the typical corporate-giving realm. It’s unusual.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin said it in their first letter: We’re not a conventional company, and we don’t intend to become one.
Specifically on the issue of racial justice, that really came from our Googlers. Our black Googlers, in particular, led a hoodie march in our offices. They did a really good job of raising awareness, flagging this issue as one that’s really important. It created conversations within Google, where we asked ourselves, “Is this an area where we might have a unique role to play? Is this an area where we could add to the conversation, add to the solution?”
How much separation is there between Google the for-profit company and Google.org the foundation? How aware are Google employees of your work?
There’s like no separation. [Laughs.] They typically will just ping me and say, “Hey, I have an idea. Can we get coffee?” We get so much interest from Googlers.
For example, last year we had more than 2,000 Googlers who donated 20 percent of their work time, or more than that, on a Google.org project. Google has something called 20 percent time: If you have your manager’s support, you can work on a project other than your day job that’s either an innovative new product with Google or working alongside Google.org to help on programs. We have an internal tool where Googlers can see what grantees are working on and how they can help them.
Our business model is that we want to invest and give organizations funding and also provide Googler expertise. We have a lot of Googlers who are working with grantees to achieve their products and their programs.
One thing we did was create an open dialogue where we asked Googlers to give us suggestions on issues they thought we should tackle and particular grantees they thought we should know about, called #betterworldfaster.
What can a nonprofit do to catch the attention of Googlers or Google.org?
The one thing for all nonprofits to look at first is Google for Nonprofits, which provides free ads and apps for qualified nonprofits. That’s available for everyone. Number one, I would start there.
For Google.org grantees, we specifically look for innovation. We think our unique value-add is in funding technology and innovation and folks who are thinking of things differently who have scalable ideas. It could be a little bit earlier stage, but if it were successful, it could be brought to scale.
We also look for “googliness” in teams: agile teams with an entrepreneurial spirit who are moving fast, who do the launch-and-iterate model similar to us. We look for a proven track record. We really value data and evidence of efficacy and transparency as well.
We have various models of how we find our grantees. We have one called an Impact Challenge that we have done in 10 or 11 countries or regions. We have one going on right now, for example, in Latin America where any nonprofit in that region can apply for the Google Impact Challenge. We have local leaders who help us make decisions about who to fund.
