In Good We Trust
Edited by Bruce Kelley and Nan Wiener (San Francisco Magazine)
It’s not as strange as it seems that people here are talking about our epic global economic stoppage as an opportunity. The Bay Area’s intellectual curiosity and hubris have often produced spectacular innovations during downturns (the Apple II after the gas crisis, Netscape et al after the ’90s recession, social networking after the dot-bomb). We may pretend to love boom times, but we’re most inspired when things get serious.
The moments when the Bay Area mattered most were rife with creativity: the hippie ’60s; the ’90s, when communities like the WELL blossomed into a full-throated Web; the Facebook explosion of this decade. Our current upheaval may ultimately make all of those look like small change—Americans could have less money to buy stuff or front our military forever—but isn’t that what many of us have been wishing for? Kim Klein, founder of the Grassroots Fundraising Journal and an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, is one of more than 100 thinkers and doers we interviewed for this special report. “I don’t want to trivialize people’s suffering, but I do not hope at all that the economy recovers to what it was,” she says, reflecting a common view here. “In 2006, we had the largest gap between the rich and poor. Why do we want to return to that? America needs to reinvent itself anyway, and I’m hoping the nonprofit sector will raise those fundamental questions.”
That’s where Bay Area opportunists enter the picture. Start with the mavericks (let’s reclaim that word) who’ve been drivers of the environmental, antiwar, civil rights, and AIDS movements and now the nonprofit sector. “They wanted to change the world, and now a lot of them are, by running key multimillion-dollar agencies,” says Sandra Hernández, the quietly giant public servant who leads the San Francisco Foundation. Add in the quantum-leap tech and business types who’ve been starting foundations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and clean-energy companies. Put them all together, and you can see how the region’s sharpest minds have been busy transforming the language and methods of philanthropy and social action—and sometimes commerce, too.
Look around at the terrain that we almost take for granted. San Francisco now has nearly one nonprofit organization for every 100 residents, and the Bay Area spends more than twice as much per capita in the nonprofit sector as the nation does as a whole. Although just 2 percent of the U.S. population lives here, we house four of America’s top 11 foundations and three of the top 11 community foundations. In one five-year period, 295 new family foundations were formed in Santa Clara County, by far the steepest increase in the state. And a wide assortment of philanthropic affinity groups, from Hispanics in Philanthropy to the nation’s first Persian community foundation, PARSA Community Foundation, were formed here.
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