TGL Features

Listening at the Speed of Trust

Pedro Arista, senior director at San Francisco’s Hirsch Philanthropy Partners, has a saying: “Collaboration moves at the speed of trust.” Pedro Arista, Senior Director at Hirsch Philanthropy Partners. Arista, a philanthropic advisor at Hirsch, is a strong advocate for community-centered approaches to philanthropy that are influenced by Trust-Based Philanthropy and Participatory Grantmaking. In these frameworks, funders look to communities for insights, solutions, and decision-making power, treating them as trusted partners working together to achieve greater racial equity and systems change. Since 2017, in partnership with the Hellman Foundation team, Arista has led the Hellman Foundation’s Collaborative Change Initiative, which has [...more...]

Mental Health Staff, Bed Shortages Delay Critical Care for Bay Area Residents Amid Growing Demand

Arlene Stanich-Prince, Executive Director of Ohlhoff Recovery Programs. Ohlhoff Recovery Programs Executive Director Arlene Stanich-Prince has witnessed the barriers her clients face in accessing treatment in the Bay Area again and again.But she also knows this from personal experience. Her husband, insured by a prominent managed care organization, had to wait four months to see a mental health professional several years ago, and then was allowed to see that person only five times. If he wanted to continue his sessions, he’d have to see another therapist and start the process all over again – so he decided to go outside [...more...]

Filling in Gaps When Resources Are Dwindling

Queen Adu-Poku, CEO of Royal Emotional Care. At the start of the 2023 school year, San Francisco public schools received $1.28 billion to spend on 48,000 students – that’s nearly $27,000 per child. But in the coming years, that number is expected to decline dramatically.  The city gives out funds based on school attendance, and numbers are expected to go down. That’s due to a number of factors, including people deciding to pull their kids from public schools and moving out of the Bay Area entirely. With the needs of students having only increased in the wake of the pandemic, [...more...]

Providing Underserved Youth With Pathways to Opportunity

It’s a cold, unfortunate fact that while growing into adulthood, a teenager’s success can be highly dependent on their financial situation. In 2022, as pandemic-related safety net measures came to a close, California saw its child poverty rate for children under 18 years old jump from 7.5% to nearly 17%, the state’s largest increase in 50 years. As these anti-poverty policies recede, teenagers and young adults across the state are caught in limbo during a pivotal moment in their lives.  While the grip of childhood poverty can sometimes be too strong to escape, the key to loosening that grip is [...more...]

Sustainability and the Right to a Future

For some, the concept of sustainability, defined by the U.N. in 1987 as, “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” has been muddied as a mere environmentalist buzzword, which is a shame because it’s a noble and necessary pursuit. In the book Collapse, written by UCLA professor of geography Jared Diamond, the author tells in deep anthropological detail about the fall of several civilizations throughout world history. While reading, it could strike the reader how frequently societies thrived or languished based on the simple administrational choices they made regarding [...more...]

Nonprofits Offering Lifelines to the Bay Area’s Unhoused

Homelessness is an endemic issue across America, but especially in California where the state’s eight largest cities are each settings for some of the country’s largest unhoused populations. Among the root causes for this expansive crisis is a shortage of affordable housing – a financial squeeze forcing many residents onto the streets where they face harsh conditions, suffering both physical and mental hardship. Where local governments fail to implement meaningful legislation to ameliorate the homelessness issue, there are several nonprofit groups working tirelessly to prevent more people on the brink from living on the streets. Legal Assistance to the Elderly [...more...]

The Pressing Need to Protect the Younger Generation from Rising Violence and Crime in the Bay Area

Within the Bay Area, running parallel to the city’s sprawling landscape of ecological, cultural, and racial diversity, are increasing disparities in wealth, which starkly color the city’s social fabric. Regionally, levels of child poverty across the Bay Area are around 20 percent, while households containing Black and Latino children are twice as likely than other racial groups to live in poverty.  Most known for her photograph Migrant Woman, a snapshot of the economic hardships experienced by both mother and her children during the Great Depression in California, much of Dorothea Lange’s other work from this period features images from the [...more...]

Dispensing Arts to Heal Society

Artists, storytellers, teachers, and community leaders have long understood the power of art and story to transform individual lives, as well as society at large. From ancient times, and in cultures around the world, music, poetry, and dance were prescribed as medicine, and were viewed as fundamental to the healthy working of body, mind, and community. A proud Creativity Explored artist sharing their talent with the world. For the last few generations in the United States, perhaps going back to the Russian launch of the Sputnik Rocket in 1957, public support of art and culture has faltered, replaced by an [...more...]

Everyday Animals Are Superheroes

We love our animals. As pets, our cats, dogs, birds, rodents, and lizards are our most loyal companions and best friends. We love them so much, we don’t always recognize what, aside from their love, they’re giving us in return. A pet in your household is correlated with several health benefits: lowered blood pressure, reduced levels of anxiety and depression, improved cognitive function for older people, improved social skills for children. The mere responsibility of taking care of a dog means more outdoor activity for the owner, and therefore, more opportunities for socialization, as well as lowered cholesterol and triglyceride [...more...]

From Idea to Impact: The Bay is a Community Foundation Powerhouse

Great ideas always start with someone. In the case of Community Foundations, which now hold more than 10% of all philanthropic funds in America, it was a Cleveland man named Frederick Harris Goff. Having worked as a litigator for John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil in the early 1900s, and as president of the Cleveland Trust Company, Goff was no stranger to wealth. He also advised families on estate planning and became increasingly concerned about what happened to those estates when the causes they were dedicated to no longer matched the needs of the community. “How fine it would be,” [...more...]

New Money New Money

Philanthropy, incorporated for the public good, can and should make all its investments accordingly. In 2021, Senators Angus King (I-Maine) […more…]

Mobilizing Bold Philanthropy Northern California Grantmakers

Dwayne S. Marsh, who recently joined Northern California Grantmakers (NCG) as President and CEO, doesn’t have time for business as […more…]

The ‘Bay’s Team’ On and Off the Court Warriors Community Foundation

While the Golden State Warriors’ dominance on the court has global reach, the franchise and its foundation are deeply rooted […more…]

Collectively Moving the Needle East Bay Community Foundation

Founded in 1928, East Bay Community Foundation (EBCF) partners with an active network of donors, local government funds, institutions, and […more…]

San Francisco Foundation Doing Good by Doing Well San Francisco Foundation 

For the last 75 years, the San Francisco Foundation (SFF) has laid the foundation for countless community initiatives in the […more…]

SVCF: Leadership and Expertise are Driving Massive Donations to Local Nonprofits Silicon Valley Community Foundation

It all starts with trust. In the spring of 2022, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) – the largest community […more…]

Philanthropy Made Big Changes. Will They Stick? Philanthropy Made Big Changes. Will They Stick?

Pandemic. Political and economic instability. A generational reckoning with racism. In the wake of the double blow of COVID-19 and […more…]