Strategy & Budget

Each fall, our team engages in a planning process to reflect on what we have learned, set goals and priorities, and establish a grantmaking budget.

2022 Strategic Direction

This year, we will stay the course with our regular grantmaking and continue with responsive grants focused on recovery from the pandemic. We also expect to use what we learn this year to chart a course for 2023 and beyond as we anticipate winding down responsive giving and refocusing on our core commitments to general operating support and capacity building. Our entire staff continues to explore principles of racial equity with a goal of sharpening how we examine, learn from, and adapt our grantmaking. To that end, we have also launched a new program area called Family Opportunity that builds upon some of our existing grantmaking in immigration and makes room for future work focused on expanding and sustaining equitable opportunities for families. In addition, we allocated time and budget to explore two new initiatives focused on community voice and mental health.

Past Years' Reports

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. We also made deeper investments in housing to focus on regional policy and advocacy work. This is particularly exciting given some of the promising opportunities to address the housing crisis around the Bay Area. Our team continued to spend a lot of time in the field with our partners to deepen our understanding of how we can best support families with young children living in poverty. On a slightly different note, our team spent time articulating how the foundation’s work connects more broadly to the work of its sister philanthropic entities in Wildcard Giving: Acton Family Giving and Solidarity Giving.

2018 Grant Data

Grants Paid
317

Unique Grantees
264

Payment Range
$1,000-$500,000

Average Grant Payment
$77,221

Grant Payments
$24,479,150