The Latino Community Foundation is on a mission to support Latino-led nonprofits and to increase the civic and political participation of Latinos in California. One of the main ways it’s doing that: the Latino Giving Circle Network, a collection of 22 giving circles throughout the state. The circles have attracted 515 members and given more than $1.7 million to roughly 100 Latino-led nonprofits throughout California since 2012. Foundation officials expect the network to reach $2 million in total giving by the end of the year.
When the pandemic hit, the foundation and its giving circles went into overdrive. The first order of business was to provide immediate relief to low-income Latinos throughout the state, many of whom are essential workers. Beneficiaries included farmworkers, who have been hit hard by Covid-19, the resulting economic crisis, and now California’s recent wildfires.
“Our giving circle members were the first among our donors to say, ‘We need to move rapidly. We need to move money to organizations that are helping our Latino families who’ve lost jobs or who have family members who’ve gotten sick with Covid,’” says Jacqueline Martinez Garcel, chief executive of the Latino Community Foundation.
The circles have given about $150,000 for Covid relief — most of it in the first two months of the pandemic — to small Latino-led charities and to the foundation’s Love Not Fear Fund, the pandemic relief fund it launched in March. The Love Not Fear Fund has so far raised more than $1.8 million and has given a total of $900,000 to 70 nonprofits. Garcel says the goal is to eventually raise a total of $10 million for the fund.
The Love Not Fear Fund and the giving circles are also directing resources to long-term efforts to build the economic, civic, and political power of Latinos throughout the state. Giving-circle members have volunteered with voter-registration groups, worked with community groups to encourage census participation, co-authored opinion articles with nonprofit leaders, and communicated with state lawmakers on behalf of struggling farmworkers and others.
“Beyond the dollars we contribute, being a member of the circles brings fulfillment when you know you’re a part of the important change that needs to happen,” says Maria Alvarez, a founding member of the San Francisco Latina Giving Circle. “You’re supporting these nonprofits that are on the ground working with these families that are part of the communities that we come from.”
Culture of Giving
The Latino Community Foundation’s first giving circle started in 2012. The foundation’s staff — just three people at the time — wanted to see what they could do to help Latinos in greatest need in California.
“We knew that there was immense need and a huge inequity in terms of the funding going to Latino nonprofits,” says Masha Chernyak, the foundation’s vice president for programs. “We knew we had work to do to influence and to push Latino philanthropy and corporate America into building the right relationships to leverage the type of investment we wanted to see.”
She said her colleagues wanted to find a way to tap into Latinos’ ingrained culture of supporting one another and giving back to their neighborhoods, churches, or home countries if they are immigrants. Giving circles seemed like a way to harness Latino culture to help struggling families and over time establish greater economic and political power for the state’s Latinos.
Strengthening Latino charities has been a critical part of the strategy from the beginning, Chernyak says. For the last eight years, she says, Latino leaders have told her they feel alone and forgotten by the wider philanthropy world.
“When you see the data that 1.1 percent of all philanthropic dollars go to support Latino organizations or causes, you can see why they feel that way” Chernyak says. “We’re here to change that.”
A series of meetings with Bay Area Latino professionals about the idea to start the circles led to the creation of the first one, the San Francisco Latina Giving Circle.
Maria Alvarez, vice president of the nonprofit Common Sense Latino, attended one of those early meetings. She says she became a founding member of that first circle because she was attracted to the sense of community it provided and by the prospect of being able to use her professional expertise and networks to bolster small Latino-led nonprofits.
“Most Latino organizations have small budgets, and they don’t have access to the big grants and big foundations because they’re grassroots and don’t have the networks or connections,” Alvarez says. “That resonated a lot for me.”
Nonprofit Pitches
Alvarez’s circle started with 14 members and has grown to 40. It has awarded $272,500 to about two dozen nonprofits focused on a wide range of topics — leadership development for women and girls, women’s economic empowerment, disaster relief, civic engagement, and education. Giving money, however, is only one part of what giving circles do.
Members of Alvarez’s circle deliver food and other supplies to a charity that helps rural and Indigenous Latino families. Several members have joined the boards of charities the circle supports or coach and mentor nonprofit leaders. All the members of the San Francisco circle are bilingual. Some have volunteered in recent months with civic-participation groups to call Spanish-speaking voters and encourage them to vote in the upcoming election.
Many of the women in Alvarez’s giving circle are executive-level or other senior professionals, but she says the circle is starting to attract a younger group of women who are in their 20s and just starting their careers. She estimates members’ salaries range from $75,000 to $250,000.
All giving-circle members in the foundation’s network are required to contribute a minimum of $1,000 a year, or about $83 a month. Each giving circle chooses its own funding priorities.
Foundation staff members bring in local experts to educate circle members about the causes they have decided to support. Then they research charities for the circles, prepare reports on each charity, and help the circles identify the Latino-lead nonprofits in their chosen causes. Circle members select three finalists to invite to Grant Night, when the nonprofits pitch their organization to a circle. Members then vote on which charities to support and decide how they want to work with their grantees beyond the grant money they are awarding.
The foundation also handles much of the administrative work for the circles, including distributing grant money to the charities.
The median age of giving-circle members is 29, and about one-third of all circle members make $100,000 to $200,000 a year, the median salary range for all circle members. Only 7 percent make $500,000 or more a year. Alvarez’s group, the San Francisco Latina Giving Circle, is one of four circles that is all women. Chernyak says that over all, about two-thirds of all of the Latino Community Foundation’s giving circle members are women.
‘Farmworker Caravan’
Husband and wife team Joanne Sanchez and Jacob Martinez started the Central Coast Giving Circle about a year ago. Both have worked for nonprofits, and Martinez founded and leads Digital NEST (Nurturing Entrepreneurial Skills with Technology), a Watsonville, Calif., group that operates technology career centers that aim to help youths from underserved agricultural parts of Central California expand their skills and connections to build successful careers.
The couple started the circle after Martinez pitched Digital NEST to another of the giving circles, Latinos in Tech, and became one of its grantees.
“His experience made us decide to start Central Coast Giving Circle,” Sanchez says. “We saw that giving $100 here and there on our own was good, but seeing that we could have a bigger impact if we got other people like us involved was eye-opening.”
The Central Coast circle has 17 members who range in age from their mid-20s to early 50s. Sanchez doesn’t know her group’s salary range but can count schoolteachers and nonprofit workers among the professions in her group. The circle awarded its first round of grants in May. So far, it has given $13,800 to six nonprofits that help struggling farmworkers and their families.
The grants went to organizations that work to improve housing and health care for farmworkers, offer access to the arts, aid victims of domestic abuse, help undocumented students pay for college, and involve parents in their young children’s education and development.
In April, Sanchez’s circle started what she calls a farmworker caravan. Members drive to the farm fields several times a month to thank farmworkers for their labor and hand out food and school supplies. The circle also set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for local families and to get technology supplies like headphones, tablets, laptops, and internet hotspots to families in rural parts of Fresno, Calif.
Cheering Donors On
Sanchez says she loves working with the Latino Community Foundation staff, not just because of the research and support work they do.
“Their biggest support, for me, is when they come out to our groups, and they’re so passionate about what we’re doing,” says Sanchez. “They motivate us, and they’re great cheerleaders for us. They shed light on nonprofits that are helping Latinos. You feel so much more connected.”
Garcel says the foundation plans to build an endowment, but it has no intention of becoming a repository for philanthropists to park their cash in donor-advised funds to get tax breaks.
The long-term goal for giving circles and the foundation’s other efforts is to mobilize and strengthen one of the largest ethnic groups in California and create a network of young Latino professionals who are committed to giving back and helping strengthen Latinos throughout the state.
“This is a new generation of philanthropists that we are trying to educate and cultivate,” Garcel says. “We want to show them how to use their circles of influence to support the communities and organizations they’re funding and open doors of opportunity for nonprofits that otherwise wouldn’t have a lot of access.”
