Sunlight Giving

In the first part of the year, we spent time learning more about the ten counties in our geographic focus area. This time in the field — meeting with nonprofits and public and private funding partners — gave us insights into the needs and opportunities in each community. These insights, along with new research that mapped local variation in child poverty, informed our grantmaking approach for the year. We refined our Safe Spaces strategy to place greater emphasis on supporting community-based spaces that promote engagement, connection, and safety.

Our core portfolio remained steady in 2018. We explored several new areas of focus identified by partners in the community and allocated grant funding to support that work for the next several years. We made grants to support regional efforts to prepare for the 2020 Census so that all communities, particularly those that are hard to reach, are counted accurately. An accurate census count is critical because the population data collected are used to allocate millions of dollars in federal funding to support low-income families in the Bay Area.