To raise money, charitable organizations in Northern California grapple with certain realities unique to their part of the country. For example, research has found that affluent donors whose money comes from the region’s technology companies—among the biggest wealth drivers in the country—often shun local nonprofits in favor of national and global causes more than donors from other places do.
An often-cited 2016 report titled The Giving Code found that only 7% of donations from Silicon Valley private foundations go to charities in the region. (Be sure to check out IP’s coverage of a three-year effort to counter this trend.) One analysis by the Philanthropy Roundtable identified other fundraising challenges: technology donors’ obsession with data and reports, as well as their reluctance to provide charitable support for social problems that require hands-on human intervention, and aren’t as amenable to “brisk quantification” — issues like addiction, domestic abuse, persistent poverty, mental illness and others.
Combine the giving patterns of the region’s donor class with stark inequality, punishing natural disasters, and an unceasing pandemic, and Northern California’s fundraisers have had a challenging few years. Still, echoing fundraisers across the country, development professionals in the area described to us a wide range of outcomes, with some seeing record high numbers and others barely able to keep the lights on.
For example, despite tech donors’ reputations, most of the Northern California fundraisers interviewed for this article said they had not noticed a difference in giving among affluent donors from the industry. One or two, however, did call out the well-documented tensions.
“Technology donors give less to their home community,” one San Francisco fundraiser observed. “In the Bay Area and technology, donors are more open to international and education than to their home community.”
One foundation — the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the nation’s largest community fund with more than $10 billion in assets—has taken technology donors’ sparse giving to local charities seriously. Under Nicole Taylor, president and CEO, the foundation began a concerted effort in 2019 to educate donors, many of whom created donor-advised funds with technology wealth, about regional causes, and to persuade more of them to give to local nonprofits.
By October 2021, the foundation had distributed $464 million to Bay Area charities—a 13% increase compared to the same period in 2020.
Another issue affecting fundraising in Northern California is the region’s growing number of serious natural disasters, from earthquakes to its persistent, worsening wildfires, an annual occurrence.
By 2020, when the pandemic upended the nation, the North Valley Community Foundation in Chico, nearly 200 miles from Silicon Valley, had raised $70 million in contributions after the Camp Fire devastated the region in 2018. The money earmarked for wildfire relief far outstripped the more than $3 million that the foundation subsequently raised for pandemic needs. The wildfire money was used to buy personal protective equipment for medical workers, testing equipment, breathing apparatus to protect ambulance workers and other needs.
Nonprofit organizations in Northern California, just like charities in other parts of the country, have experienced sharply varying fundraising outcomes in the pandemic, now entering a third exhausting year.
Some Northern California groups have done exceptionally well over the last two years, in some cases raising more money than ever before. Before the pandemic exploded globally, San Francisco’s CommonSpirit Health Foundation, which oversees 83 local foundations that raise money for nonprofit hospitals, reported contributions totaling $217 million in fiscal 2019. By the time its 2021 fiscal year closed on June 30, CommonSpirit had raised a record $285 million.
What’s more, fiscal year 2022 will likely set a new fundraising record for the third year in a row, according to Fred Najjar, CommonSpirit’s executive vice president and chief philanthropy officer. He attributes the fundraising increases to, among other things, forming a “pandemic task force” of representatives from the local hospital foundations in early 2020. To support medical staff and other caregivers, the task force came up with toolkits that provided sample communications, virtual programming and case-for-support information for the entire CommonSpirit fundraising network, raising $25 million in its first six months.
Meanwhile, he says, corporate grantmakers have also stepped up, giving additional funds for pandemic-related needs such as pop-up vaccine clinics in low-income communities.
The Nepal Youth Foundation, based in San Francisco, also hit higher fundraising numbers over the last two years, raising $2.5 million in its most recent fiscal year, which ended June 30. That’s up from $2.2 million in fiscal 2020.
The gains were achieved thanks to long-time supporters, both individuals and foundations, increasing their donations, with the latter offering general operating support and waiving time-consuming reporting requirements on how grants were used.
Another win for Nepal Youth Foundation: transforming its in-person June special event to an online affair in 2020. It has repeated the virtual event with improvements, including adding an online auction, even after it resumed the live event this year.
“We have been able to pivot to online and raise more money,” says Eric Talbert, the charity’s executive director and lead fundraiser, echoing what other nonprofits nationwide have been saying about pandemic-era fundraising events.
“It is costing less money and taking the same or a little more time,” Talbert adds. “Online gatherings are here to stay,” serving as a valuable addition, even after live fundraising efforts resume.
That’s also the approach being taken by Reading Partners, a 23-year-old charity headquartered in Oakland that works to improve reading skills among children in kindergarten through fourth grade. Reading Partners’ most recent online fundraising event brought in $300,000, exceeding its $260,000 goal.
Individuals, corporations and foundations have all increased their contributions to Reading Partners in the last year or so, says Karen Gardner, chief development officer. That enabled the group to raise $27.5 million last year after a dip in 2020. The charity’s 2021 fundraising returns were $1.3 million more than what Reading Partners raised before the pandemic hit.
But other Northern California charities are struggling. For example, the Mind Body Awareness Project in Oakland, which works to transform underserved communities and train those who serve them with mindfulness-based mental health tools, has had a tough time raising any money since the pandemic began.
The charity, which has a paid staff of three assisted by volunteers, also earns revenues by charging some clients such as mental health facilities, police departments and schools for mindfulness and stress-resistance training. But even that stream of earned income has been substantially reduced with widespread COVID restrictions. In juvenile detention centers, for example, visitors have been barred during the pandemic, making it harder for the Mind Body Awareness Project to provide in-person training — even as incarcerated juvenile clients endure more stress with no visitors allowed and less ability to move about freely in lockdown.
The Mind Body Awareness Project has developed online training to replace its in-person sessions, but its ability to do the work has been reduced and disrupted. Some clients, for example, have whipsawed between in-person and online training as the pandemic waned and then resurged—a less-than-optimum experience for training recipients.
“There has never been more of a need for supporting marginalized populations with mental health tools,” says Micah Anderson, the charity’s clinical director. “There’s increasing money out there because mental health has never been more of a buzzword.”
But, he adds, “The disconnect for us is that we often don’t have the funding to even go find the money. Our funding is drying up, and it’s a stone in our shoe.”
The Mind Body Awareness Project, Anderson says, is now relying on a small number of contracts because it can no longer afford a full-time grant proposal writer.
His charity is not alone in its fundraising struggles, Anderson notes. “Many nonprofit organizations are in a tailspin, he says. “A lot of nonprofits are in the process of going under or are strapped for resources.”
That is doubtless the case, judging from the experience of trying to reach fundraisers and other charity leaders in Northern California for this article. In my more than 30 years of reporting, it has never been more difficult to set up interviews or get a response from nonprofit organizations. Calls and emails went unanswered, and contact information was often outdated or out of service, suggesting that at least some nonprofits have either gone under or at least can no longer afford office space.
Even fundraisers that report increased donations feel the continuing strain of the pandemic. At the Nepal Youth Foundation, for example, Eric Talbert started his job two years ago, but still hasn’t been able to meet his colleagues or donors in person. “I started work remotely, and I still am doing this,” he says. “We have only met on Zoom or over the phone.”