Special Projects & Funding Collaboratives

As a catalyst for change, The San Francisco Foundation’s mission extends beyond grantmaking. We harness our broad knowledge, local expertise, and extensive relationships to address complex issues facing the region. Through special projects and partnerships, we collaborate with community-based organizations, government, other foundations, and donors to create new approaches to meeting the Bay Area’s ever-changing needs. Our current special projects & funding collaboratives include:

Arts Loan Fund (ALF)
A collaborative program of the members of Northern California Grantmakers, ALF provides quick-turnaround, low-cost financial assistance to arts organizations located in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Monterey, San Mateo, Sacramento, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, and Sonoma counties, and individual artists located in the cities of Oakland and San Francisco. For more details, visit the ALF website here.

Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative
The Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative (BAWFC) is a partnership of 11 philanthropic foundations which leverages public and private investments to strengthen and expand the Bay Area’s workforce training system. The BAWFC has made over $10 million in grants to programs which provide job training to low income job seekers, while meeting the workforce needs of key industry sectors in the region. The BAWFC invests in efforts that promote the development and sustainability of career ladder initiatives which prepare individuals with barriers to employment for entry level positions in occupational sectors offering career advancement opportunities and family-sustaining wages. To date, the BAWFC has supported over 40 job training programs which have trained 2,000 jobseekers.

Funding partners include: The California Endowment, East Bay Community Foundation, Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, Grove Foundation, JP Morgan Chase, Kaiser Permanente, National Fund for Workforce Solutions, The San Francisco Foundation, Thomson Family Foundation, Walter & Elise Haas Fund, Y & H Soda Foundation.

Through special projects and partnerships, we collaborate with community-based organizations, government, other foundations, and donors to create new approaches to meeting the Bay Area’s ever-changing needs.

City Fields Fund
Bob, Bill, and John Fisher grew up playing sports in San Francisco parks and want to make sure that city kids today have the same opportunities. But many of San Francisco’s athletic fields are in poor condition and, worse, there aren’t nearly enough of them. The brothers established the City Fields Foundation in 2005 to meet this challenge. In 2006, City Fields and the City of San Francisco teamed up on a pilot project to fix up dilapidated sports fields in two parks – Garfield Square in the Mission, and Silver Terrace just outside the Bayview. With $4.5 million from the City Fields Foundation and $1 million from the City, the public/private partnership finished both projects in less than six months. The San Francisco Foundation was asked to join the effort because of its extensive philanthropic network and strong track record of investment in local neighborhoods. Through our City Fields Fund, The San Francisco Foundation receives and acknowledges tax deductible contributions from donors, and grants these funds directly to the City Fields Foundation. To encourage broad community support, City Fields and the City of San Francisco will each match every private dollar raised.

The Civic Engagement Fund
Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian (AMEMSA) communities are among the fastest growing ethnic groups in California and in the Bay Area. The Civic Engagement Fund (CEF), initiated in 2006, is a capacity building initiative designed to support organizations, and to strengthen the civic participation, of Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian (AMEMSA) communities within the Bay Area.

Through capacity building, civic engagement, and leadership development, CEF is based on a learning model that creates avenues for shared learning and understanding on the part of our philanthropic partners and community partners. Through these partnerships, leaders and civic organizations work together to tackle issues of discrimination in schools and the workplace, racial profiling, selective immigration enforcement, detention and deportation and media stereotyping, to advance social change, and build toward a common and collective good.

The Fund was developed through a strategic partnership between Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP), an affinity group of the Council of Foundations, and The San Francisco Foundation, and has brought on a range of additional San Francisco Bay Area philanthropic institutions. Read more about the history of CEF and learn more about current CEF grantee partners and organizations. 

The Fund is administered by AAPIP. For more information, please contact Laila Mehta at AAPIP at 415.273.2760.

Funding partners include Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Y&H Soda Foundation, Whitman Institute, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, James Irvine Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation collaborating through the Community Leadership Project.

Community Leadership Project
The Community Leadership Project is a collaboration between foundations and communities of color to strengthen grassroots organizations. The David and Lucille Packard Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation have committed $10 million to the Bay Area, Central Coast, and San Joaquin Valley over the next three years. The San Francisco Foundation is honored to join eight other grantmaking organizations in this ongoing commitment to organizations supporting low-income and communities of color. 

In addition to the funds granted by the Hewlett, Irvine, and Packard Foundations, The San Francisco Foundation has committed an additional $375,000, bringing the total funding for our portion of this project to just under $1.5 million.

In consultation with a pool of community partners, The San Francisco Foundation has selected ten nonprofits for core support and technical assistance grants. The grantees are:

• Arab Resource and Organizing Center
• Causa Justa :: Just Cause
• Chinese Progressive Association
• Filipino Community Center
• La Raza Centro Legal
• Leadership Excellence
• Marin County Grassroots Leadership Network
• Multicultural Institute
• Omega Boys Club
• South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN)

San Francisco Bay Area Capacity Builders of Color Directory

As part of the Community Leadership Project, the San Francisco Bay Area Capacity Builders of Color Directory launched in April 2010 to help:

• community-based organizations, nonprofits, and foundations identify prospective capacity builders of color; and
  
• capacity builders of color working with the nonprofit sector in the San Francisco Bay Area get the word out about the services they offer.

This searchable online database contains approximately 100 capacity builder profiles, each with personal and contact information, demographics, professional expertise, references, former clients, links to publications, and more. You can search by numerous fields, as well as print individual or multiple capacity builders’ profiles. Find a capacity builder now at www.bayareaconsultantsofcolor.org.

Creative Capacity Fund (CCF)
Administered by the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI), CCF is a field-building initiative designed to support a broad range of training and peer learning opportunities for arts professionals. Under TSFF, current grantees of the Arts & Culture Program or individual artists living in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, or San Mateo counties are eligible to receive up to $1,000 for staff of arts organizations and $500 for individuals to subsidize the cost of professional development opportunities. For more details visit the CCF website here.

Great Communities Collaborative
The Great Communities Collaborative (GCC) is a group of organizations dedicated to ensuring that the San Francisco Bay Area is made up of healthy, thriving neighborhoods that are affordable to all and linked to regional opportunities by a premier transit network. The GCC connects local residents with the tools and resources they need to influence decision making, forge diverse partnerships to craft lasting strategies, and harness the means to help move visions to reality.

The GCC was formed in 2006 to work towards a future where mixed-income transit-oriented communities would become prevalent in the Bay Area. The founding organizations, the “core partners,” share a keen awareness that the region’s trend of growing by sprawling was socially and environmentally unsustainable. There are presently seven core partners: Greenbelt Alliance, Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, TransForm and Urban Habitat, Reconnecting America, The San Francisco Foundation, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The strength of the GCC core partners has always been complemented by the local expertise of grassroots community organizations that work within specific communities, and by technical assistance providers who create tools and additional expertise on specific issues like community health and mixed-income housing. In total, the GCC presently consists of 27 nonprofit partners throughout the Bay Area.

The GCC was instrumental in catalyzing an initial $10 million grant from MTC that led to the creation of the Bay Area Transit-Oriented Affordable Housing (TOAH) Fund. The Fund will strategically buy sites to develop into affordable housing near transit. The fund was launched in March 2011 and is now capitalized at $50 million. For more information, visit our Environment News page.

Funding partners include Ford Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Gerbode Foundation, East Bay Community Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Kresge Foundation, and Oram Foundation.

Strength from Within
Strength from Within is a three-year initiative funded by The San Francisco Foundation (TSFF) and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Strength from Within was launched as an outgrowth of TSFF’s Environmental Health and Justice Initiative (EHJI), which  provided critical funding to many organizations launching projects devoted to grassroots organizing and addressing health disparities and environmental injustices. After receiving initial funding, many smaller EHJI grantees struggled to maintain the organizational staying power necessary to achieve their long-term vision and impact. Organizational leaders faced the challenge of creating and sustaining organizational infrastructure and systems with limited resources, time, and management skills. The demands of the immediate programmatic work eclipsed longer view thinking about organizational development.

Stronger organizations are needed to address the multitude of equity and social justice concerns raised by poorly regulated environmental decisions and management. TSFF wants to help encourage and fund the multi-year capacity building work required to build organizational infrastructure in communities traditionally excluded from positions of power and access to resources. Strength from Within was established to support the development of financially strong and organizationally effective grassroots environmental health and justice organizations in the Bay Area region. Please visit our Environment page for more information.