The Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has attracted billions of dollars in donations from tech entrepreneurs on the West Coast, is looking eastward.
In March, the community foundation will move one of its top officials to New York. Maeve Miccio, who previously served as the foundation’s vice president for corporate responsibility, has a new title: vice president for strategic partnerships for the eastern region.
The move across the country represents a substantial change in how traditional community foundations operate. Often community funds confine much of their work to soliciting donors from their own geographic region or to those who grew up in a community and want to support their hometowns.
A California foundation with a New York presence stems from a “Facebook” mind-set, said Mari Ellen Loijens, the foundation’s chief business, development, and brand officer. That mind-set is no surprise considering Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co founder, has donated nearly $1.5 billion to donor-advised funds managed by the Bay Area foundation, but it is also a sign that today’s wealthy are less tied to their geography than generations past.
“Our donors get to define their own community,” Ms. Loijens said. “People get to define their own groups.”
Broad Area Covered
Silicon Valley, which is the largest community foundation in the country, with $7.3 billion in assets last year, is not planning to establish an office in New York. Instead, Ms. Miccio will shuttle between individual and corporate donors in the city, along the East Coast, and as far away as Kansas City. “We’re really calling the eastern region a pretty broad area,” Ms. Loijens said.
The East Coast beachhead is being established because many of the foundation’s corporate supporters, including Glamour Magazine and PepsiCo, are located in the New York region, according to Ms. Loijens.
The fund has sought to differentiate itself from other community foundations by serving as a back office for corporate-giving campaigns. Silicon Valley helps solicit donations, distribute them to charities, and follows up with thank-you notes to donors.
Ms Loijens said the new presence will save time and money: Instead of taking a red-eye flight to New York, many meetings will simply require Ms. Miccio to hail a cab.
Renaissance in Giving
In addition to gaining easier access to many companies, Ms. Miccio will be in closer proximity to a mother lode of donor prospects — the Wall Street traders and hedge-fund managers that make New York City the world’s financial capital.
Currently, the foundation manages more than $276 million in assets from donors in the New York region, Ms. Loijens said.
The fund will attempt to attract donors based on its ability to process complex assets, including virtual currencies and pre-IPO shares of start-up companies, into philanthropic dollars. A selling point, according to the fund, is that donors will have access to giving experts who have high-level expertise and will be invited to join donor circles and networking functions with other philanthropists who give to the foundation.
Although giving in Silicon Valley has mushroomed in recent years thanks to the tech boom, philanthropy is far from a lost art in New York. In fact, in recent years the city has experienced something of a philanthropic renaissance. From 2010 to 2012, for example, New Yorkers made only four gifts that matched or exceeded Facebook Mr. Zuckerberg’s $100 million experiment on the Newark, N.J., school system. But over the next three years, New Yorkers notched at least 14 nine-figure gifts.
The announcement seemed to have blindsided at least one prominent New York philanthropy leader.
“We are surprised we haven’t heard about this from our colleagues in Silicon Valley,” Lorie Slutsky, president of the New York Community Trust wrote in an email.” We don’t comment on other foundation’s activities, but we firmly believe that what makes community foundations unique is the expertise in a particular community.”
‘A Pretty Radical Change’
Eileen Heisman, president of the National Philanthropic Trust, said the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s move challenges the notion that community foundations focus on a specific geographic area.
“It’s a pretty radical change,” she said.
Earlier in her career, Ms. Heisman was a fundraiser at the Philadelphia Foundation. While there, she recalled, the foundation’s staff tried not get into turf battles. It was an unspoken rule, she said, not to solicit donors who lived in areas served by neighboring community foundations.
“There was some overlap,” she said, “but the overlap doesn’t usually extend 3,000 miles.”
Ms. Loijens said the grant maker’s New York presence wasn’t a threat and that there was “plenty of room for everybody.”
Traditional community foundations, she said, see “big walls drawn at county lines.”
She said the Silicon Valley Community Foundation is different: “We just don’t see community like that.”
