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COVID-19 Response

We are committed to responding to the unprecedented impact of COVID-19 on our local communities and nonprofit partners. We have seen how our grantee partners are rising to the challenges of these times by adapting, going above and beyond, and providing critical support to families and communities around greater Silicon Valley.
 

Our primary focus is supporting our grantee partners so that they can continue serving families and their communities during the public health and economic crisis created by COVID-19. We have and will continue to provide rapid response funding to our grantee partners to respond to the unprecedented demand for services, unanticipated costs, decreasing revenue, and more. We are monitoring the impact of the crisis across the region by listening and learning from our partners, and will adapt our grantmaking as needed to best serve the needs of families across the region.

In response to the COVID-19 health and economic crisis, we have deployed a multi-phased funding response to support our partners and the communities they serve.

Phase Two

July – November 2020

This phase of COVID-19 support focused on addressing ongoing needs of families to replace lost income and remain housed. We prioritized funding organizations that provide cash and rental assistance for families, and renewed grants to partners that provide food, housing legal aid and distributing cash assistance to families regardless of their immigration status. We issued two rounds of grants during this phase, and included additional funds during the second round to acknowledge the expesnes associated with running distribution programs. 

In total, we distributed $7,145,000 so that partners could continue meeting the deep and ongoing needs of families. This brings our total COVID-19 response funding in 2020 to $12.4M, which was in addition to our regular grant making.

Phase One

April – June 2020

We made $4.3M in additional responsive grants to directly address the urgent needs of our grantee partners during this phase of funding. The intention of this round of funding was to ensure that families continued to have access to trusted community-based organizations working to meet their basic needs. We also aimed to assist with the additional financial pressures direct service organizations are facing in delivering services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Grants were made to organizations to ensure they can continue to serve as an uninterrupted resource for families. The majority of funding supported organizations that were seeing radical increases in demand or were adapting service delivery to continue responding to community need. Grants went to food banks, multiservice providers, shelters and other housing providers, community health clinics and child care providers.

In addition, we made a grant to help launch the California Immigrant Relief Fund which provides direct cash assistance to undocumented Californians and their families who are ineligible for COVID-19 federal relief and state safety-net programs.

Immediate Response

March 2020

As shelter in place orders began to take effect and people found themselves unable to work, we moved quickly to respond to the emerging public health and economic crisis. Working with local community foundations and United Ways, we deployed $1M in grants to pooled funds. The pooled funds included:

  • Community Foundation for Monterey County
  • Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County
  • East Bay Community Foundation
  • San Benito Community Foundation
  • San Joaquin Community Foundation
  • Silicon Valley Community Foundation
  • United Way of Merced County
  • United Way of Stanislaus County

 

Learn More

Explore our responsive grants
http://sunlightgiving.org/grantmaking/sunlight-grants/all?field_sunlight_giving_...

 

COVID-19 Response