Foundation reaches past barriers and U.S. border
When Erika Segura moved to the Bay Area from Mexico in 2011, she spoke no English. Now, after transitioning from English classes at the Sequoia District Adult School in Menlo Park to Redwood City’s Cañada College, the 28-year-old is taking computer classes and other courses with hopes of becoming a paralegal and ultimately a lawyer. She also tutors other adult English students.
“I never could have done this without Melissa,” Segura said, referring to the Sequoia counselor who did everything from cheerleading and handholding to arranging for Segura to take her quizzes at special times when she was pregnant.
Mexican-born Ramon Alvarez, 28, tells a similar story. “I tried to hide from people speaking English,” said the former dishwasher, whose growing language skills enabled him to move to prep cook, line cook and currently sous chef at an Izzy’s restaurant. “Now I’ll talk to anyone.” He, too, credits Melissa Martinez for help with choosing his Cañada classes and locating money for books and parking.
None of these things might have happened without a grant from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The support for Martinez’s position as a college information specialist is one tile in a mosaic of support for English language learners. In 2013, the Mountain View-based foundation distributed $2.2 million in grants to help about 3,300 immigrants gain a foothold and then some in English. Those same funds also provided a variety of legal services for about 21,000 immigrants.
The pattern of giving spreads out from these and other immigration issues to education for schoolchildren, economic security for Peninsula residents and others struggling with the pun- ishing cost of living, regional planning and such safety-net services as food banks and transitional housing.
Business is booming
With assets of more than $4.7 billion in fiscal year 2013, SVCF is the largest community foundation in the country and the 12th largest overall, according to the Foundation Center. The $4.7 billion asset figure is up dramatically from $2.9 billion in 2012. That’s a fitting philanthropic marker of Silicon Valley’s boom and attendant generosity.
Recent eye-popping donations include the $990 million that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave in 2013 and a just-announced gift of $500 million from GoPro founder Nicholas Woodman and his wife, Jill Woodman.
The foundation’s scope and reach extend well beyond its eponymous Silicon Valley. In partnerships with more than 2,000 individual donors and families and about 100 corporations, SVCF will have a grant pres- want to spend their philanthropic dollars in innovative and transformative ways.
“If a donor can think of some problem they want to address, whether that means ending hunger or trying to change the educational system in California,” Loijens said, “we’re going to try to find a way to make that happen.”
Power in small things
“The cost of living is barely manageable for everyday people when it’s a recession.
In a boom it’s almost
intolerable. ” Emmett D. Carson, CEO and president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation
ence in about 80 countries in 2014, up from 39 last year. In 2013, according to a forthcoming fiscal year report, the foundation distributed $362 million in grants. The lion’s share of those grant dollars flows from donor-advised funds. Projects range from largelens initiatives on world hunger and disease to a school for orphans in Uruguay.
“We want to meet our donors where they are,” said Mari Ellen Reynolds Loijens, chief business, development and brand officer. Those who have made their fortunes in the region’s entrepreneurial environment often
For Emmett D. Carson, the foundation’s gregarious and charismatic CEO and president, a simple but powerful principle underlies much of the foundation’s work: “Small things can make a huge difference in people lives. Small things that ought to be arbitrary,” he pointedly added, “but often aren’t.” Carson, who has a gift for giving abstract ideas and values tangible substance, recounted his own early lesson on the issue. Raised in a rough stretch of Chicago’s South Side riven by gang violence, he witnessed the shooting of a neighbor’s child. “I remember my mom holding me down from the picture window,” he said. Shortly thereafter, his father came home and announced a decision to move the family 30 blocks away to a better neighborhood.
Pausing over a bowl of hot-and-sour soup at a Chinese restaurant across the street from SVCF’s sleek offices on El Camino Real, Carson described the overnight change in his own life as a fourth-grader. “Suddenly I could ride my bike anywhere and not have to be home until dark. Suddenly I had teachers with high expectations of me. And I kept thinking about the friends I had 30 blocks away who couldn’t ride off the block. Thirty blocks! And it meant everything.”
Carson, a Princeton Ph.D. in public and international affairs who worked previously at the Ford Foundation and the Minneapolis Foundation, came to Silicon Valley in 2006 at a crucial time for the organization he was tapped to lead. Charged with merging the competing Community Foundation Silicon Valley and Peninsula Community Foundation into a single new entity, he had his work cut out for him.
“They weren’t just rivals,” Carson said. “They were the Hatfields and McCoys. They didn’t know each other, and they didn’t like each other.” Faced with joining two comparably sized organizations that were different in everything from the way they did business to their computer systems, Carson hit on a defining metaphor. The two older foundations were the parents, and the new Silicon Valley Foundation would be the offspring.
“Children are going to look sort of like Mom and sort of like Dad. But kids are not going to do everything you did. It’s not a repudiation of who you are. It’s them trying to be themselves. It struck a chord.”
Regionalism
Carson was quick to credit the parent foundations for recognizing the growing regionalism that drove the merger. “When I first arrived,” he said, “it was preposterous to think of San Mateo County as being part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Eight years later, San Francisco now thinks of itself as part of Silicon Valley.
“So it’s insane,” Carson continued,“that you have to get off a Santa Clara bus at the county line and get on a San Mateo bus to get into San Francisco. It’s the same thing with regional transporta- tion as it is with the housing crunch. San Francisco’s housing crisis can’t be solved irrespective of Palo Alto’s housing crisis, or Sunnyvale’s. We’re all interconnected. And not just on our smart phones and tablets.”
Carson drew a distinction between the first tech boom, around the turn of the millennium, and the current one. “The wealth back then was often ostentatious and on display. That hasn’t characterized this boom. The donors I meet are very humble and feel a larger responsibility to get involved. Because they’re making their money by networking the world, these people think in multidimensional terms: ‘I care about this place where I live. I care about the country. I care about the new world order.’ ”
But as Carson pointed, the very wealth and wellbeing that enables change puts more pressure on those who are left out. “The cost of living is barely manageable for everyday people when it’s a recession,” he said. “In a boom it’s almost intolerable. People who started off being marginal really can’t make it work now.”
Knowing how and where to target a foundation’s grants is always an evolving work in progress. That’s especially true in Silicon Valley, where technology is arguably pushing change faster than it is anywhere. Carson mused on what might happen when 3-D printers become “as ubiquitous as microwave ovens. Or think about the trade-off of jobs versus the improvements for the elderly and disabled when driverless cars take hold.”
‘2 Silicon Valleys’
“There are two Silicon Valleys,” said Erica Wood, SVCF’s chief community impact officer. “There’s the one we always hear about, and then there’s a very different community that has significant needs.” San Mateo and Santa Clara counties have the highest number of immigrants in the state. Forty-two percent of third-graders in San Mateo County read below grade proficiency.
The foundation’s focus on education — and other issues — is grounded in research and statistics when possible. In addition to grant-making, SVCF is involved in lobbying to address problems like predatory payday lenders. The to-do list is always long and growing.
Down the hall from Wood’s office, a group of SVCF grantees were meeting to discuss their organizations’ successes, shortcomings and challenges. “The cost of living is barely manageable for everyday people when it’s a recession,” he said. “In a boom it’s almost intolerable. People who started off being marginal really can’t make it work now.” The conversation sounded lively and animated from the hallway. These quarterly “cohort” meetings are a trademark of the foundation, a crucial way to get people talking about common and contrasting concerns in this large, culturally diverse and often bureaucratically balkanized region.
Lionel de Maine, chief operations office at the Sequoia District Adult School, said the cohort meetings have been invaluable. “We learn a great deal from each other about best practices and about things that don’t work,” said de Maine, who added that those exchanges might not have happened without the foundation’s cohort meetings.
“But it goes beyond that,” he said. “We’re able to coordinate with other schools and districts to find the right place and the right paths for students. We’ve got a saying here that we try to live up to: ‘There’s no wrong door for students.’ ”