A region where residents dream big

As The Chronicle’s Visionary of the Year award enters its fifth cycle, one upshot is unmistakable: We are never going to exhaust a supply of worthy nominees. The challenge is narrowing the list of possibilities to six finalists.

Fortunately, I had some significant help with a nominating committee that included three mayors (London Breed of San Francisco, Libby Schaaf of Oakland and Sam Liccardo of San Jose), perhaps the nation’s preeminent elder statesman who served in four Cabinet positions under three presidents (George Shultz), the chief of protocol to both the city of San Francisco and the state of California (Charlotte Mailliard Shultz), and the founder and CEO of Tipping Point, the ultimate make-a-difference foundation (Daniel Lurie).

It was an inspiration just to tap the knowledge of these luminaries who are so well connected in their communities and so eager to identify the visionaries in them.

The committee’s recommendations will begin to roll out in the coming weeks, featuring the unveiling of each finalist with a profile of him or her in the Bay Area section. I am confident you will be as impressed as I am with the diversity and ingenuity of the visionaries.

As we began this process in the fall, the No. 1 question among the committee members was: “How do we define a visionary?” As I told one of the them in an email: “We don’t have any precise criteria. We give nominating committee members a lot of leeway to define visionaries. Basically we’re looking for people who have produced innovations with a public good and have shown impressive results — ideally with a potential to bring it on an even wider scale.”

Some of our past nominees have reached international scale, such as Salman Khan, whose vision of offering free, no-cost educational resources has gone global, or Chase Adam, whose use of technology to directly connect donors with patients in impoverished countries who desperately need medical care has come a long way from his moment of epiphany when he was on a bus in Costa Rica and encountered a mother going from row to row to solicit spare change for her son’s treatment. Others have been more local in orientation. What they all have in common is a sense of mission and a sound plan to achieve it.

Schaaf, entering her third year on the nominating committee, explained that she wasn’t just looking for great ideas but the “actual change” that was taking place as a result. Not surprisingly, she had some uplifting examples with Oakland origins.

“As elected officials we can lift up the stories of our visionaries,” Schaaf said. “We can also make it acceptable to talk about some of the raw hard truths that they are shining light on, to not back away from them, but to walk toward them.”

Liccardo, serving his first stint on the committee, was eager to pitch some of the unsung heroes of the South Bay.

“People come here from all over the world to create, to build,” he said. “We’re so blessed in Silicon Valley, not simply because of the technological innovation all around us, but because of the spirit of social innovation that we have, to be able to attack the biggest challenges we face: around affordable housing and homelessness or crime or educational opportunity. Whatever those challenges are, we see individuals who are willing to roll up their sleeves to think differently about how to tackle those problems.”

Breed also emphasized her determination to highlight the positive contribution of innovators in San Francisco: “People who push the envelope and come up with new ideas for the purposes of helping to make sure people in the Bay Area grow and thrive.”

Lurie, who has brought an entrepreneurial sensibility of accountability and results to philanthropy, said, “When I think of visionaries, especially in the nonprofit sector, I think of people that are changing lives every single day. People that are in the community, that understand the needs of our community, and are willing to go the extra mile to make sure those needs are met.”

George Shultz traces the Bay Area’s sense of doing things differently back to the first explorers who ventured through the Golden Gate and saw a “beautiful setup” that was wide open and encouraging. As our editor in chief, Audrey Cooper, observed, everything from denim jeans to the personal computer has been imagined and created here.

As Charlotte Shultz, whose imprint has made the city and the state worthy of their status as envies of the world, put it: “There are not enough awards to go around to all the visionaries that are in this wonderful Bay Area that attracts people from all over the world to do wonderful things.”

The committee members and I have come up with six such visionaries to honor as finalists, with the award winner to be announced at a San Francisco gala in late March. Once again, prepare to be impressed.

John Diaz is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: jdiaz@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnDiazChron