The Hidden Genius Project, which trains and mentors Black boys and teenagers about technology careers, entrepreneurship, and leadership skills, was at a crucial point in 2015.
The small Oakland, Calif., charity was seeing rapid growth in the number of volunteers who wanted to participate, and it was ready to hire paid staff so it could expand its operations. It needed money. Its timing was fortuitous.
It was right around then — long before the nation had heard of George Floyd — that the East Bay Community Foundation was becoming more responsive to the needs of grassroots groups, particularly those focused on equity and racial justice. Its then-CEO, James Head, who had joined the organization the year before, was pushing the community foundation’s donors to start directing money toward nonprofits they might have never heard of before — small charities working to rebuild communities.
“They helped tell our story and the impact that we’re having,” says Brandon Nicholson, executive director of the Hidden Genius Project. “It was a significant impact for sure.”
The partnership was crucial in fueling Hidden Genius’s growth from an annual budget of about $350,000 in 2015 to a planned $6.2 million in 2022, including a campaign for a new building to house Hidden Genius and other local Black-led organizations.
Hidden Genius is one example of many nonprofits that saw their budgets get a boost as Head and the East Bay Community Foundation got donors to think differently about their giving priorities. Another Oakland group, the Roots Community Health Center, worked with East Bay to better tell the story of how it is helping more people get access to health care, and it has grown as a result.
People didn’t realize how deeply social injustice permeated communities. That included our donors.
Head and East Bay have managed to get donors to think differently about their giving priorities — not just persuading them to direct money to small organizations but also to shut down the flow of cash from donor accounts to hate groups and organizations that engage in discriminatory practices.
These and other efforts have made East Bay a national model for community foundations working to give greater priority to equity issues after Floyd’s murder by police spurred protests around the country.
Tapping Donor-Advised Funds
As with many community foundations, a large share of the assets at the East Bay Community Foundation are in donor-advised-fund accounts, in which donors deposit money in investment accounts until they decide which charities will get it. In the case of East Bay, about 82 percent of its assets are in DAF accounts, so getting the donors who contributed to those accounts on board was crucial to making East Bay a potent force for equity and grassroots support in the region.
Donors have their own deeply entrenched values and ideas of where they want to give, so Head met resistance. How do you get a donor whose passion is animal rights, for example, to take a closer look at a nonprofit like Hidden Genius?
Head had a plan.
To get more money flowing to grassroots groups and nonprofits focused on equity, Head had to persuade donors of the need and the results that could be achieved.
“People didn’t realize how deeply social injustice permeated communities,” Head says. “That included our donors.”
The East Bay Community Foundation embarked on a donor engagement and education program. Donors were introduced to people like Nicholson and were shown their work firsthand.
Financial Lifeline
Noha Aboelata, founder and CEO of Roots Community Health Center, says East Bay has been a powerful catalyst for growth. The nonprofit was founded in 2008 and hired its first paid staff member in 2013. Fourteen years later, it has 200 employees and a $20 million annual budget, says Aboelata.
Aboelata says she had much to learn about fundraising and running a nonprofit in the early years. “I didn’t know what a donor-advised fund was,” she says with a laugh.
As the East Bay Community Foundation learned about the center’s work providing access to health care for people who previously didn’t have it, unsolicited donor-advised-fund contributions started arriving in amounts ranging from $5 to $20,000, some of them anonymous, says Aboelata. East Bay and Head also helped connect the health center with other foundations for additional funding.
And when Covid arrived, East Bay was quick to respond, Aboelata says. There was no application; $30,000 in unrestricted funds arrived, unsolicited, from East Bay’s Covid rapid-response fund, she says.
“When the pandemic hit, the East Bay Community Foundation was the first to say, ‘We see you; we see your work. Here’s some funding.’ It was the most rapid response of anyone,” she says.
That story underscores what makes Easy Bay special, says Aboelata. It doesn’t wait for grant applications to arrive; it goes out of its way to find the organizations that are “the anchors in the community” doing important work for the people who need it the most.
“They are rooted in community like we are, and they know firsthand about the work that’s happening,” she says. “They’re able to assess the work that’s being done in a unique way because they’re on the ground with us.”
Head’s plan for change didn’t always work, but many donors did reorient their giving, he says.
The key, he says, was not to bully or shame donors into changing their giving patterns but to expand their knowledge about the immediate needs in their community and the groups that were struggling to address those needs.
East Bay also explained to donors why unrestricted grants were particularly helpful to charities — it allowed them to rapidly move money where it was needed the most.
The organization says about two-thirds of its grants have been unrestricted since 2016. In fiscal 2020, 28 percent of the money granted from donor-advised funds was for general operating support.
Ready for the Future
East Bay has the resources and the connections to make it a powerful force for change in the Bay Area. It primarily serves Alameda and Contra Costa counties, although its reach often extends beyond those boundaries, and it frequently collaborates with the San Francisco Foundation and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
East Bay has about $820 million in assets under management, including $670 million in DAF accounts. Those figures are up from $379 million in total assets and $184 million in DAF accounts when Head took the helm of the organization.
East Bay made 2,884 grants totaling $238 million during the 12 months ending on June 30, including $212 million disbursed from DAF accounts.
Other community foundations seem to be catching up with the efforts that East Bay launched years earlier. About 70 percent of community foundations reported increasing their efforts to address racism and community needs and expressed greater openness to “shaping donors’ behaviors,” according to a recent report by the Center for Effective Philanthropy.
And East Bay’s work has drawn attention and praise from some big names in philanthropy.
Nicole Taylor, CEO of Silicon Valley Community Foundation, said in a statement that community foundations face a challenge when it comes to bringing donors along with the organization’s values.
“The East Bay Community Foundation has been on the forefront of this work for years; they have always had a strong conviction in their underlying values of social justice,” says Taylor, who previously worked at the East Bay Community Foundation for 15 years, including six years as CEO.
Taylor adds that East Bay was doing that work long before the social-justice movement started gaining traction broadly in philanthropy.
Kathleen Enright, CEO of the Council on Foundations, has known Head for more than a decade, dating back to when she was leading Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. Head has been a leader in persuading other community foundations of the value in strengthening their ties to community groups, says Enright.
East Bay also took an early stand against using donor-advised funds as conduits for sending money to hate groups, Enright says. Many community foundations, but not all, have since followed suit, she says.
“There was a risk that it would alienate donors, but it attracted donors,” says Enright, because it sent a clear signal about what East Bay stood for.
Some groups like East Bay go beyond banning grants to groups on the “hate” lists produced by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center; they also forbid grants to organizations that engage in discrimination. “Just because they’re not a hate group doesn’t mean that they are worthy of financial support,” says Enright. “The litmus test has to be higher.”
Those screening efforts have been especially important in recent years because the IRS lacks sufficient staff to weed out applicants for 501(c)(3) status that don’t meet the criteria, says Enright.
East Bay also prohibits grants to nonprofits that require participation in religious activities to receive services.
Head says declaring some nonprofits off-limits for grants was a lonely and difficult fight early on. The concept “flew in the face of donor intent,” he says, a concept that can be sacred in some fundraising circles. The key to making the change work, he says: “Lots of conversations with donors.”
Enright notes that Northern California has become something of a hub for “values-aligned philanthropy,” a movement her organization promotes to get philanthropy united in combatting “antidemocratic extremism, hate speech, and politically motivated violence.” Those efforts blossomed in the region thanks to people like Head, Taylor, and Fred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation.
“It’s easier to move things when others are moving similarly,” says Enright.
East Bay may be much further along than most community foundations in its evolution toward an organization centered on equity and racial justice, yet challenges still lie ahead. For example, Head acknowledges that the organization still has much work to do when it comes to attracting donors of color.
And keeping the staff focused on equity and justice is an ongoing process, says Head.
Head says he made it clear to the staff soon after his arrival that East Bay would be headed in a new direction that everyone needed to follow. That new direction and those new values were clearly articulated in the hiring process as well, Head says.
“I found lots of folks who found that attractive to them,” Head says.
Enright says community foundations following East Bay’s path should focus first on making sure they have a diverse organization in which different kinds of people can thrive. It’s also helpful to hire people who can lead multiethnic groups, she says.
If you lose some people who don’t accept the mission, consider the search for their replacements as an opportunity for “natural rejuvenation,” Enright says.
“When you get clearer about your values, sometimes some folks will choose to move on,” she says. “That is a natural part of any process, and it’s not a bad thing.”
More Changes Ahead
Head recently left the East Bay Community Foundation, and Pamela Calloway is serving as interim CEO during the search for Head’s successor. Calloway says the Board will look for someone who will continue the innovations and changes that began under Head’s leadership.
Head was aggressive in building a staff that believes in the mission of East Bay, especially in terms of its efforts to help charities that serve marginalized people, and that work continues by, for example, hiring staff members who formerly were community organizers, Calloway says.
“Community organizers help us figure out who really needs help and how,” she says.
Calloway says she’s never stepped into an executive role at an organization that is so poised to succeed. Donors agree with East Bay’s values, and the staff fully supports the mission, she says. “I kind of feel giddy about it, actually,” she says.
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. See more about the grant and our gift-acceptance policy.
