Welcome to The Giving List San Francisco Bay Area, 2023
We are thrilled to present you with this year’s edition of The Giving List San Francisco Bay Area. We hope this will be a useful tool as you sort through the many important nonprofit organizations and causes that depend on your support for survival.
The Giving List was created out of the belief that storytelling, one of the most powerful tools we have as humans, is vastly underutilized in educating donors on the foundational work being done by nonprofits.
What you have in your hands is a compendium of powerful stories describing the work being done by some of the most vital nonprofit organizations in the Bay Area. Organizations on the front lines of recovery, pressing for social and racial justice, uplifting our children and families, supporting the arts, and fighting to preserve our precious natural world.
These are fast-moving times with an ever-growing list of causes that demand our attention. As we move through COVID and the inequities it’s laid bare, a cataclysmic housing crisis, and the ongoing call for greater racial and gender equity, there are also other pressing, wide-ranging needs: the war in Ukraine, gun violence, an assault on women’s reproductive rights, all while the wildfires and drought underscore a deepening climate crisis.
If you’re a longtime donor to Bay Area nonprofits, we hope this book can help you be more thoughtful in your giving even as you’re inundated by all the needs mounting around us. If, on the other hand, you’re newer to giving and just beginning to think about where your philanthropic passions may lie, we hope we can help direct you to some of the wonderful opportunities that would make a huge difference in this region.
In either case, our intent is to help you break through some of the noise created by so many pressing needs by bringing your attention to some of the most important giving opportunities in this region.
That is not to say that the organizations in this book are the only ones worthy of your support. But we do believe that the nonprofits represented in these pages strongly represent the Bay Area’s vibrant nonprofit and philanthropic culture. They are organizations that are doing important work, at an important time, and are worthy of your strong consideration. We hope that the work we’ve done to tell their stories will move you as much as they have moved us!
In addition to telling the stories of some of this region’s most vital nonprofits, this book explores the foundational work being done by the Bay Area’s leading Community Foundations, including the journeys and perspectives of some of the most important social sector leaders and philanthropists who consistently demonstrate a devotion to bettering the lives of those living in this community.
We have worked closely with each organization in this book to tell its unique story to you because we believe that helping organizations of all shapes and sizes gain direct access to individual donors is not just important but critical. Nothing is as impactful as giving locally, and the best way to change the world is to uplift your own beloved community.
This book would not be possible without the help and support of some of the Bay Area’s premier institutions. We are deeply grateful to Silicon Valley Community Foundation, East Bay Community Foundation, Marin Community Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, Battery Powered, Northern California Grantmakers, Generation Thrive, and Holocaust Museum LA for their partnership in this book. The impact of your ongoing commitment to supporting the Bay Area’s nonprofit community is immeasurable.
We hope you are as inspired by reading this book as we have been in making it.
Sincerely,
Gwyn Lurie
CEO,The Montecito Journal Media Group