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, were formed here.

Great and necessary reforms are also blooming. Clean tech: Forty percent of all the venture capital dollars invested nationally in the field last year went to Silicon Valley companies. Healthcare reform: The Healthy San Francisco program—midwifed by Hernández—is the nation’s first to guarantee healthcare access for the uninsured, which is Obama’s goal. Education reform: Perhaps the nation’s most iconoclastic do-gooders, Don and Doris Fisher—who, along with their son John, just quietly snapped up controversial lumber company Pacific Lumber with a promise to save its old-growth holdings—has given more than $60 million to the KIPP network of college-prep schools in lower-income communities, which is making parts of the public-school establishment squirm.

Local grantmakers are breaking the mold as well. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, while trying to figure out how best to spend up to $15 million a year lessening pollution caused by crops and livestock production, started what must be the first ever wiki for potential grantees. Even amid the banking catastrophe, charity leader Wells Fargo—now with Wachovia in its fold—is increasing its donations to nonprofits (almost $17 million locally last year). Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll, eBay’s cofounders, have both riskily invested part of their foundations’ endowments in long-shot businesses (including, for Skoll, electric-car startup Tesla Motors) that promise to help solve global problems. That’s new in the charity world. As Skoll Foun­dation chief Sally Osberg explains, “We’re interested in doing the most good, period.”

Reflecting all this energy and innovation, America’s image of the effective philanthropist has become a mash-up of accomplished locals. Imagine someone with the analytical rigor of Gordon Moore, the brashness of Carly Fiorina, the passion of Alice Waters, the intellec­­­t­ual restlessness of Stewart Brand, and the Rolodex of John Doerr—especially the Rolodex. “Philanthropy is changing because it’s harnessing the lessons of capital markets and venture capital,” says Greg Baldwin, the head of fast-growing nonprofit VolunteerMatch.

Tech-think dominates this new mindset for an obvious reason: It dominates everywhere. Google and its ilk stand atop the culture. The people behind those companies were ahead of their time, so how they think about the world matters. “The Valley is the pace setter,” says Emmett Carson, of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has grown into the nation’s biggest giver among community foundations, thanks in part to managing many of the area’s new family funds. “Go back to the industrialists, like Ford and Rockefeller. They created a style of philanthropy that others followed across the world. Today, people look here.”

That style is to think big and bet aggressively but analyze mercilessly. Good works used to be largely local, piecemeal, and driven by emotion; the goal wasn’t to rock the boat, but to help the less fortunate endure the passage. “We can do no great things, only small things with great love” was Mother Teresa’s mantra. Now, say experts like Paul Brest, the influential head of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and coauthor of Money Well Spent, you don’t just write the check or show up at the soup kitchen—you narrow down your passions, tease out your “theory of change,” invest in startups and people with similar theories, advise and push them, then decide whether to scale them up. And like any VC, adds Carson, “you’re look­-ing at ways for projects to become self-sustaining.”

When times were good, those were big enough challenges. But now that soup kitchens are overrun and everyone’s 401(k)s are worth 40 percent less than they were before, such goals appear impossible. Yet—this is our moment, isn’t it? Obama’s campaign spurred some of this counter­intuitive optimism. After all, we invented many of the online tools that he put to such historic good use. These days, every activist with a cell phone imagines pulling that same genie out of the bottle. “All of a sudden,” says Holly Ross of NTEN, an organization devoted to bringing tech solutions to worthy causes, “nonprofits are capable of having a thousand one-on-one conversations, instead of one conversation with a thousand people.” And seers here know the true potential is still untapped. Causes could go viral worldwide in hours—hell, in seconds. That image alone makes them smile.

So does the local donor base. “Bottom line: The Bay Area has very generous people. They weather every recession,” says Cathy Schreiber, of the Women’s Foundation of California. Even as scores of non­profits cut back and contemplate mergers—and as two in three foundations nationwide say they will be giving less—the region isn’t showing any signs of quitting. Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen says that memberships to SV2, the nonprofit she founded to give tech executives and entrepreneurs a way to help locally, are up since the Dow came down. Members donate $3,000 and commit to lending their expertise to startup community organizations. “When times get tough,” she says, “people here get more interested in the things that matter the most.”

Let’s face it: What matters most around here is not just doing good, but doing it in ways that feel pioneering and even cool. On the following pages, we feature 19 great ideas that are now spreading—or should—from the Bay Area into a world that badly needs them.
—BRUCE KELLEY (Interviews by April Dembowsky)

Good idea #1: Donating computers is an art
There’s an archetype in philanthropy. Call him the good-hearted American technologist who makes his fortune, hops on a plane, and unloads computers on poor villagers around the world. It’s a nice image, but in reality, he’s an outsider who has no idea how the machines will be used and usually fails to make a difference.

“We paint this idealistic picture of how technology can promote social change,” says Daniel Ben-Horin of TechSoup Global, a 170-employee Bay Area char­­ity that for 22 years has successfully shuttled donations from major tech companies to needy NGOs worldwide. “But if you try to send shiny new products, you run into a huge number of problems.” No one knows how to use the equipment. Or it breaks, and no one knows how to fix it. Worse, it’s irrelevant to the place where it lands. “What would every child in rural India do with a laptop?” asks Radha Basu, cofounder with her husband, Dipak Basu, of Bay Area nonprofit Anudip Foundation, referring to the well-publicized program One Laptop Per Child. “Good intentions,” she adds, “are sometimes a strong recipe for failure.”

Radha is one of many local technology innovators who don’t fall into that trap. Anudip has created 16 education centers where rural Indians in the chronically poor Sundarbans region, on the Bangladesh border, learn computer skills and how to start technology-based companies. An estimated half of the centers’ graduates get better jobs; another 15 percent have started their own businesses. A key reason for the organization’s success—Anudip is considered one of our most effective international nonprofits—is that the Basus aren’t traveling to some unfamiliar land. They’re from India, so they have been able to meld seamlessly with villages where Dipak speaks the local language. Dipak also spent a year interviewing Sundarbans residents to better understand how their communities worked and what they needed.

Other Bay Area nonprofits have also learned to listen before acting. Respected San Francisco NGO Inveneo tailors every tech solution it brings to sub-Saharan Africa to the particularities of each village. RiOS Institute, a Los Gatos–based group of tech missionaries, is suspicious of any proposed solution that seems to be driven by hardware, rather than by real needs. If being from a country helps you give back to that country, then the Bay Area is preposterously well positioned as a hotbed for such innovative groups. As of 2005, immigrants held half of Silicon Valley’s engineering jobs and had founded half of its high-tech companies.

Radha herself started up a $250 million branch of Hewlett-Packard in India. But despite their big ambitions, both she and her husband believe in a somewhat cautious entrepreneurial pace. Philanthropists need to approach a community in the same way a business approaches an unfamiliar market, Dipak says. “You have to adapt before you scale up."
—ERIK VANCE

Good idea #2: The teen angel
Remember the movie Big, in which a 12-year-old boy inhabits the adult body of Tom Hanks and, among other adven­tures in dramatic irony, wows the heads of a toy company with his insights? Well, for even longer than Big has been out on VHS, a Bay Area–based movement has known that teens are good at consulting on more than PlayStation 3. They’re also instinctively savvy about deciding which after-school program or malaria-prevention project is worthy of a $5,000 to $10,000 grant.

“We live in a one-touch society where as soon as kids turn on their computers, they’re see­ing faces of children in need all around the world,” says Sue Schwartzman, of the Bay Area–based Jewish Community Teen Foundations, where grants are decided by teen-led boards. “If you give them respon­sibility, they take it and run with it.”

Another organization, San Francisco’s Youth Leadership Institute (YLI), is a pioneer in the field, spawning more than 150 youth-led grantmaking programs nationally. The institute isn’t shy about the fact that it’s targeting wealthy kids. This month in San Francisco, YLI will host its first “philan­thropy summer camp” to bring together teens slated to some­day give away their parents’ and grandparents’ money with teens from disadvantaged communities who’ve been on the receiving end of such charitable grants. Imagine those discussions. After a week of being introduced to one another’s realities, all the teens will vote on how to dis­tribute $10,000 in grant money.

Says the institute’s founder and CEO, Maureen Sedonaen, “The days of showing up to quarterly board meetings and saying, ‘Sure, that sounds good’ are really over.”
—APRIL DEMBOSKY

Good idea #3: Whatever your cause, leave no footprint
For 115 years, the Good Samaritan Family Resource Center, an immigrant settlement house on the edge of San Francisco’s Mission district, has struggled mightily to help families become self-sufficient through job training, housing, and the like. You’d think that global warming would be the last thing on the organization’s agenda—but Good Sam’s board has committed to a leading-edge and very expensive retrofit of its Potrero Avenue buildings. Why?

“We’re citizens on this earth,” says board member Bill Lorton. “We have a real problem with climate change. This is the new world we’re living in.” Already, installing energy-efficient lighting has cut watt usage by a quarter and costs by half. Next up are 30 solar panels and a wind turbine on Good Sam’s roof, where a vertical garden—already blooming with celery, cabbage, and herbs—is morphing into an outdoor classroom where the organization’s kids will study tilapia grown in tiny, high-tech fishponds that circulate water from the gardens. Good Sam still needs to raise half of the $200,000 cost of the new projects, but when it does, the buildings will run much more cheaply and use zero nonrenewable energy.

Such do-no-harm thinking is spreading throughout San Fran­cisco’s nonprofit world. Graduates of Goodwill’s successful trucking academy are given training in how to drive and maintain their vehicles for maximum fuel efficiency (imagine how in demand those drivers are now), and other strapped social-service organ­izations are somehow managing to put time and money behind energy efficiency. Says Mario Paz, Good Sam’s executive director, “It’s not just about putting panels on the roofs. We want to use the opportunity to educate our community about this earth. Very often, our communities are the last to learn or to benefit.”
—MOIRA LAWLER

Good idea #4: The killer app—'nuff said
CEO Marc Benioff has made his company, Salesforce.com, as famous for philanthropy as it is for its data-management applications. He’s a big, driven, enthusiastic, fourth-generation San Franciscan who learned the business under Larry Ellison at Oracle. But he’s done Ellison one better as a do-gooder, writing two books on corporate philanthropy, telling anyone who will listen that “you shouldn’t wait to give until you're dead,” and inspiring companies (including Google) to join Salesforce.com in donating 1 percent of company time, equity, and products to causes—Benioff calls this the 1/1/1 model.

To which nonprofit executives around the world say, jackpot! “We use the Salesforce system not because they gave it to us,” says Robert Bennett, head of Family Service Agency (FSA) of San Francisco, “but because it’s conceptually miles ahead” of the competition at help­ing an organization do everything from tracking case files and donations to evaluating its successes.

Salesforce products have a cult following among small businesses and multinationals alike for being ridiculously easy to use, customize, and update. Subscribers like Dow Jones Newswires and a division of Google pay top dollar for them, but the company gives nonprofits the first 10 licenses for free, and the rest at an 80 percent discount or also for free. So far, more than 5,500 nonprofits in 60 countries, including bigger outfits like United Way and universities, have received the products through the donation program. In a recent MarketTools survey, nonprofits using Salesforce applications reported a 39 percent increase in staff productivity.

Agencies and NGOs could certainly use the help. Nonprofits are notoriously lean and mean but also inefficient—they traditionally haven’t had the time or money to systemize what they do. Some are still stuck in analog times. As recently as three years ago, FSA relied on decades-old paper systems to track 12,000 clients enrolled in its 30 different social-service programs, and to file financial reports with 66 different funders. Caseworkers spent half their time on paperwork. Bennett, a former software developer at Resource Development Associates, a company he founded, looked at dozens of data-management programs to remedy the situation—but most were too limited. He also knew how hard it would be to build a platform from scratch. Since Bennett started using the Salesforce applications, FSA’s caseworkers have been spending up to 30 percent more face time with clients. Even staff members in their 70s who had never touched a keyboard are into it. “We went from the middle ages to the modern age,” Bennett says.
—JUSTINE SHARROCK

Good idea #5: Everyone into the pool
Before the Obama machine turned $10 donations into a campaign jackpot, there was Kiva, the world’s first microlending nonprofit, which dared to think that groups of 20 people pooling $25 loans to help widows buy cows and dressmakers buy sewing machines would add up faster than asking fewer people to fork over more. Today, as Wall Street banks cut their microlending budgets—in some cases to zero—Kiva is exploding, racing past nearly half a million lenders and more than $70 million lent.

The crowdsourcing-for-good revolution is on, with new applications rising out of San Francisco’s petri dish of open-source activism. Waiting for the bus or the doctor? Bored in a staff meeting? A smart-phone app created by nonprofit the Extraordinaries, which hit iPhones at the end of April, channels those idle moments into bursts of handheld volunteerism: You’re sent a job translating documents for a nonprofit or tagging an archive of historic photos for a museum and, together with the rest of the crowd, knock off what was once the monumental task of a hired few. “There’s this large pool of labor that’s being squandered,” says Ben Rigby, Extraordinaries cofounder and author of Mobilizing Generation 2.0, citing the nine billion hours Americans spent playing digital solitaire in a single year. “We have a tremendous opportunity to transform the nonmarket economy.”

Another local company, Virgance, is spinning off a vote-online, act-offline campaign (called Carrotmob), in which shoppers join together for a day to spend money at a store with the most promising idea for greening its business. For the first Carrotmob event, hundreds of San Francisco residents dropped their twenties at K&D Market, a convenience store on 16th Street. The store pulled in $9,276 in one day, which it spent on a complete green overhaul of its lighting system.
—APRIL DEMBOSKY

Good idea #6: Go public with your failures
One of the most important skills in running a nonprofit is making nice: the ability to laugh at bad jokes, remember the names of other people’s children, and write effusive, adjective-laden thank-you letters. But if no one takes the initiative to call out foundations when they make mistakes, they may repeat them again and again, even when a lot of money is at stake.

To fill this gap, a couple of Bay Area foundations have replaced the usual fundraising cocktail chatter with a “failure talking tour.” Recently, the heads of the James Irvine Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation published reports on their websites about multi­year, multimillion-dollar grants that went wrong. “I assume my share of responsibility for how this ini­tia­tive unfolded,” wrote Irvine’s president and CEO, Jim Canales, after the foundation realized that the $58 million it gave to an after-school program had had only a marginal impact on students’ in-school performance. Irvine reeled in spending and refocused resources on basic literacy.For Hewlett, the mistake involved a $20 million neighborhood-improvement initiative that, accord­ing to foundation president and CEO Paul Brest, “self-destructed early on” as a result of “constantly changing” goals. “You add a lot of value to a field when you talk about what wasn’t successful,” Brest says. “You help others avoid the same mistake.”

Through the San Francisco office of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, Irvine and Hewlett also commissioned a survey of grantees and posted it on their websites, including results that rated Irvine below the median in its treatment of grantees (one program officer was described as “horrible”). Some Hewlett grantees felt as if they had been “whipped around by mixed messages.” Both foundations have vowed to examine and, in some cases, change their operations.
—APRIL DEMBOSKY

Good idea #7: (Green) power to the people
Obama’s appointment of Van “Don’t Call Me Green Czar” Jones as special adviser (for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation) brought the White House a charismatic Bay Area dynamo who has built up a powerful head of steam behind his vision of a sustainable future. This isn’t some hackneyed green scheme in which eco-conscious corporations drape their headquarters with solar panels, or rich people get in line for the new Honda Insight. Instead, Jones wants to bring the revolution to poor and working-class families. Jones founded Green for All—an Oakland-based program working for a green economy—and now, from his perch in D.C., he’s a fan of massively increasing the use of solar panels in all communities, not just wealthy ones. On the front lines of this charge is another Oakland-based nonprofit, Grid Alternatives, that has partnered with Jones’s group.

Grid Alternatives began in 2001 with an observation made during a hotel dinner by two engineers working for a massive energy conglomerate: People in poor communities are affected most harshly by changing energy prices, yet are least likely to use alternative energy. Two years later, those engineers, Erica Mackie and Tim Sears, created Grid Alternatives, along the lines of Hab­itat for Humanity. Rather than building houses for poor families, its volunteers install solar panels.

An average solar array of the size that Grid Alternatives installs costs $15,000. The trick, Sears says, is to bring that cost down enough that energy savings are immediate (meaning customers aren’t waiting 10 years for the panels to pay off). Say the monthly electrical bill for a two-bedroom West Oakland house is $50. Solar panels might save $35 per month, depending on how good the residents are at turning off lights. Grid Alter­natives cobbles together local grants and government rebates until the panels are free (which is most of the time) or cheap enough that loan payments are less than what the customer saves. Volunteers, job trainees, and the homeowners themselves do the installations—and the organization fronts rebate money, so homeowners aren’t waiting on government checks. This means that families start saving money on day one and are insulated from future price spikes.

So far, Grid Alternatives has solarized 215 homes from Oakland to San Diego. The group keeps a list of 4,000 volunteers, and, as part of the government’s stimulus package, the feds are sending more AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers as staff. Local job-training programs also provide volunteers. Eventually, Grid Alternatives
estimates, all 1.8 million low-income Cali­fornian homeowners could put up solar arrays.

Lafo Laulu, a former Hunters Point resident who apprenticed with Grid Alternatives and now installs panels professionally, says that it can be hard to convince homeowners to let strangers bolt some crazy device to their roof. But once people come onboard and the work is done, word spreads, says Mackie. “The meter is spinning backwards, the homeowner flips on the switch, and everyone is smiling.”
—ERIK VANCE

Good idea #8: Be disruptive—and have an exit strategy
Palo Alto’s Skoll Foundation likes to summarize its purpose with an attention-getting Silicon Valley adjective: disruptive. The outfit is the brainchild of Jeff Skoll and his multibillion-dollar eBay fortune. Skoll, now 44, is an intellectual who has always understood the relevance of a good story. (He helped fund An Inconvenient Truth and other paradigm-rocking movies.) So when he and everyone associated with his foundation invoke the language of venture capitalists, it’s no accident. Just like VCs seeking out entrepreneurs who are looking to upset business models with the next Google or Amazon, Skoll and his colleagues are hunting for inventors and organizations that might be approaching a tipping point in world events.

“We’re looking for disruptive ideas,” says Sally Osberg, the Skoll Foundation’s CEO. “Much like a VC has a portfolio of IT startups, we have portfolios that address global warming, clean-water access, or the Middle East conflict.” When the organization sees one of its grantees succeed, it scales it much like an investor pushing for an IPO. The founda­tion didn’t invent this style of philanthropy. The term social entrepreneur has been popular since the ’80s, and other high-profile Silicon Valley funders, like Omidyar Network and the Google Foundation, along with the mammoth Gates Foundation, are onboard. But Skoll has no peer when it comes to making the strategy visible: It created the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University; it makes grants to NPR and the Sundance Institute to back coverage of social entrepreneurs (which inevitably ends up including some of Skoll’s own grantees); and its philosophy has become part of global philanthropic culture.

Consider APOPO, an organization formed to teach rats to detect the world’s millions of land mines. The demining industry originally scoffed at the idea, but when experiments showed that a single one of APOPO’s trainees—known as HeroRats—could cover 1,000 square feet of land-mined ground in 30 minutes, a feat that would take a manual deminer two days, Skoll gave the group more than a million dollars. APOPO was also featured on Frontline/World, thanks in part to Skoll’s funding for stories about social entrepreneurs.

Like any VC, the Skoll Foundation ultimately wants its startups to become self-sustaining. Amitabha Sadangi’s organization, International Development Enterprises India (IDEI), is on its way to this kind of independence. Most farmers in India can farm only during the year’s few rainy months, a schedule that requires them to be migrant workers for at least half the year and keeps their children out of school and locked into poverty. A traditional foundation might find ways to subsidize these farmers during the off-season, but Skoll hooked up with Sadangi, who had adapted an elegantly simple irrigation system called a “treadle” foot pump that sells for as little as $1 and that allows farmers to stay put and work the land. If the pump gained widespread use, Sadangi convinced the foundation, it could destroy India’s cycle of migrant farm labor while also replacing many expensive, polluting diesel pumps.

Skoll’s 2005 grant of $615,000 helped bring the pump to millions more farmers, creating hundreds of millions of dollars of new wealth—and by publicizing his efforts, Skoll also made Sadangi famous enough to secure government and other foundation funding. IDEI is now rolling out in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and parts of Africa, and it has more self-sustaining business prospects as well: IDEI makes money from pump sales and has garnered 52,000 tons of carbon credits through the European Union’s cap-and-trade system. Skoll recently extended its grant into a second round for $2.3 million, but the foundation likely won’t fund IDEI again. It won’t have to.
—JAIMAL YOGIS

Good idea #9: The computer that gives back
As I write this, my home computer is hard at work helping scientists understand the biological mechanisms of cancer and find new drugs to fight dengue fever. It’s called volunteer computing, and it’s a lot easier than cleaning up trash on the beach: Instead of donating my time, I’ve joined more than a million other people around the world to donate a chunk of my computer space to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing project, or BOINC.

The idea behind BOINC, developed in 2002 by Berkeley native David Anderson, is quite simple: Using hundreds of thousands of personal com­puters, BOINC solves millions of equations in a fraction of the time it would take a hard-pressed research lab to do the same work. According to one estimate, a typical scientific lab would need some 22 years to complete the necessary calculations for the Clean Energy Project, started by researchers at Harvard to find a better way to harness solar power. But by relying on spare computer space from people like you and me, the lab might complete the work in two years instead.

What do equations have to do with cancer and clean energy? A lot of research requires massive amounts of number crunching. When scientists at the Clean Energy Project want to test the viability of a particular material to use in solar cells, for example, they need to run thousands of model simulations to see if that material is compatible at a molecular level with sunlight. For new drugs, researchers run calculations to predict which molecule out of millions contained in a database is likely to inhibit certain viruses. All this can take place while you go about YouTubing, Facebooking, and Googling.

Joining the party is as simple as downloading the software to your computer, then requesting to participate in any number of BOINC-supported projects. Other companies have created similar software, but BOINC is the only program that lets Mac, PC, and Linux users get involved in the research of their choice and work on several different projects at once. It’s also open-source, easy to use, and free. Applica­­tions like Anderson’s SETI@home, which searches for signs of extra­terrestrial intelligence, have employed BOINC’s volunteer computing for years, but Anderson says that more volunteers are signing up now that they are able to donate their hard drives to earthier issues, like fighting disease and climate change. His goal, he says, is to recruit 10 million volunteer computers—not an unreasonable objective, given that more than a billion computers across the globe have Internet access.
—MATT BLOOM

Good idea #10: Touch wealthy geeks where they live
With so many Silicon Valley company builders accumulating fortunes in their 30s and 40s, the question gnawing at philanthropy leaders has been this: How can we make sure that this new money ends up somewhere other than a hedge fund or an IRA—specifically, someplace where it can benefit the community in which these entrepreneurs live, cruise the freeways, and work 18-hour days?

While a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, the daughter of Valley pioneer John Arrillaga, who developed many of high-tech’s office centers, figured out a solution. She founded the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund, or SV2, to give grants to local nonprofits, and she insisted that the Valley talent she recruited—many of them transplants to the area—delve deeply into the unsexy refinements that make local nonprofits more effective: accounting, consulting, marketing, managing boards—even installing the phone system.

Arrillaga-Andreessen, now a lecturer on philanthropy at her alma mater (and married to Marc Andreessen, the serial entrepreneur behind Netscape and Ning), says that this kind of face-to-face expertise helps organizations scale up to, say, teach 5,000 kids to read every year, instead of 500. “We essentially provide other donors with better bang for their buck,” she explains.

More importantly, the 150 people who give money and time to her group become more connected with their home region than they would by joining the Menlo Country Club. SV2 member Nancy Cannon-O’Connell is a leadership consultant who donates money and expertise to organizations trying to reform the school system. “You get under the surface, get to know the parents and the staff,” she says. Though Cannon-O’Connell began calling the Valley home just two and half years ago, she says she feels like she’s been there twice that long.
—APRIL DEMBOSKY

Good idea #11: Flaming philanthropy
No fundraising group better understands how willing San Franciscans are to throw money at a hairy chest draped in sequins than the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. For 30 years, these mostly gay men dressed in full nun habits and face paint have been emptying our wallets—most notably at monthly bingo nights, where prizes include porn and wine, and where calling a false bingo is punished with a public spanking. These gender-bending shenanigans yield more and more money each year—in 2009, the group hopes to break $250,000—which the “sisters” donate to local AIDS and LGBT organizations, as well as to other community nonprofits.

The idea of dressing up—or way down—for charity isn’t just a ’70s remnant. At Love 101, held this past February, drag queens lip-synched love songs at what may have been the first tranny benefit for an elementary school, raising $1,500 for San Francisco’s Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy. (A second show in April netted $3,200.) Oakland Raider Jarrod Cooper did a killer striptease at the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation’s annual Celebrity Pool Toss. And twice a year, the SoMa Bare Chest Calendar auctions off dates with its brawny boys and donates the proceeds to the AIDS Emergency Fund. That’s also where the money ends up from Nasty, a new monthly fundraiser at the Powerhouse Bar, where civic-minded volunteers demonstrate violet wands and nipple clamps in staged bondage scenes. If that doesn’t lube your checkbook...
—APRIL DEMBOSKY

Good idea #12: The 48-hour yes or no
Bill Somerville thinks there’s something drastic­ally wrong with philanthropy today—the fact that clients have to jump through serpentine hoops just to apply for a grant. It’s not uncommon for a nonprofit to spend weeks filling out a 10-page form—even if the organization is asking for only $2,000—and then wait months for a reply, most often no.

But not at Philanthropic Ventures Foundation, Somerville’s public charity in Oakland. There, clients apply with an email, a letter, or a one-page fax, and Somerville guarantees an answer—and a check—within 48 hours. (“We’re told we’re the only foundation in the country that does that,” he says proudly.) When he can, he likes to consummate the deal with a handshake, and he does all the paperwork himself, which amounts to drafting a single paragraph to satisfy contract law.

Somerville blasts found­ations for behaving like lumbering elephants. They’re passive, risk-averse, and uncreative, he says, “and they tend to fund paper, not people. A project will only work if there’s someone marvelous behind it.” His fix is disarmingly commonsen­sical: “Decrease the staff to what it really needs to be, decrease the paper to what it needs to be, and get out there and give the money to who really needs it.”
—APRIL DEMBOSKY

Good idea #13: Train masters of the universe to actually help the universe
Do we really need to produce another pack of finance wannabes to start new hedge funds, or encourage more people who want to make their fortunes drilling for oil in the Arctic Sea? If the answer wasn’t clear before the fall of last year, it should be by now—which is why the trend of green MBAs is starting to gain traction.

Not surprisingly, Bay Area schools are leaders in the field. Stanford’s Graduate School of Business was recently ranked number one in the world by the Aspen Institute’s Center for Business Education for its focus on sustainabil­ity, which basically means making sure companies are kind to the environment and do well by the people they employ (i.e., no 14-year-olds in Thailand doing all the work). UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business was ranked fourth.

But San Francisco’s new Presidio School of Management makes Stanford and Berkeley, where courses in sustainability are still mostly electives, look like Harvard (which didn’t even make it into Aspen’s top 100). Aspen didn’t include Presidio in its rankings, since its accredita­tion is different from that of the schools Aspen rates, but every one of Presidio’s classes teaches students how to turn idealistic theory into reality. The accounting course factors environmental costs into operating budgets. The communication class presents strategies for pitching ideas for sustainable businesses. The concept is even built into Presidio’s program design: Classes meet only four days a month, with conference calls, online interactions, and ongoing projects in between. This flexibility means the school can attract students from as far away as New York and Paris, as well as those who are experienced enough (meaning not fresh out of college) to be truly committed to the cause.

But there’s nothing soft about the curriculum. Diane Mailey, Presidio’s senior vice president for business development and planning, balks at the idea that the school is just a “do-good program. It’s about smart business, critically necessary business, and survival,” she says. Presidio hasn’t abandoned the profit motive, it has just added two more elements to the equation: people and the planet.

Since 2003, when Presidio opened, yearly enrollment has almost tripled to 120, and open-house attendance is up 300 percent. Corporate honchos working with students on their projects were so impressed that they asked where they could take classes, which led Presidio to develop an exec­utive program. Next fall, the school is adding a master’s in public administration for its students who want to bring the sustainability model to government.

Graduates have landed jobs with giants like Mattel and PG&E, as well as with the Environmental Protection Agency and some major consulting firms—and several of the students’ final projects have attracted significant VC money. Joe Madden, for example, who had spent 10 years in sales at TransGroup, in San Francisco, along with two other Presidio graduates, received funding to start EOS Climate, a company that applies market principles to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Another business plan translated into Greenbox Technology, which was featured on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine in February of this year for its innovative approach to measuring home energy use.
—JUSTINE SHARROCK

Good idea #14: Get kids through—not just to—college
A daunting urban math problem for the current age: This year, 639 Bayview kids started public high school, but only 339 of them are expected to graduate. Of those, approximately 130 will be eligible to attend any California state school, but only 65 or so will ultimately matriculate. Assuming that most will be first-generation collegegoers, three-quarters of those will drop out, based on estimates from similar populations elsewhere. So, how many Bayview kids now entering high school will get a BA and have any chance of returning home and helping others overcome the endemic poverty there? The chilling answer: 16.

It’s not that nobody is addressing the problem. It’s just that solutions so far have been a bit shortsighted—four years too short, to be exact. In 1981, Eugene Lang got the ball rolling when he promised 61 East Harlem sixth graders college tuition if they made it to their high school graduation. This became the I Have a Dream program, and the transformative idea behind it was to nurture kids in many aspects of their lives, not just academically. It was a great approach—only it often didn’t get kids all the way through college.

But a Bay Area initiative offers the real promise of a diploma. In 1997, Laurene Powell Jobs (she’s married to Apple’s Steve Jobs) cofounded College Track, in East Palo Alto, with Lang’s idea in mind: Recruit low-income eighth graders, infiltrate all parts of their lives, and get every one to a four-year college. Frustratingly, though, too many of the precious eggs that College Track sat on for more than four years were still getting to college and failing to hatch. So, last summer, the $3 million organization doubled its scope to include campus visits, frequent check-ins, Facebook groups, and a support network during all four years of college. “They call to ask what a bursar’s office is, what networking is, or what they should do this summer. They ask every question in the book,” says Omar Butler, who heads the San Francisco site, which opened in the Bayview two years ago. College Track now serves 213 kids in college and 638 overall, and it projects a 75 percent college graduation rate by 2010.

Überengagement over long periods is the new norm at many San Francisco programs. Every year, First Graduate taps 25 to 30 potential first-generation collegegoers in sixth grade to participate in a 10-year program that, in addition to providing academic catch-up, offers 300 to 400 hours of home visits annually, guidance on choosing a high school, meetings with community mentors, and computer training. At Friends of the Children San Francisco, first graders—the majority of them in public housing—are paired with trained staff who lend a hand for up to 12 years, making doctor’s appointments for the kids, working out with them, helping them find summer camps, and eventually taking them on college tours.

When College Track’s San Francisco site graduates its first high school class in 2011, the number of college-eligible African American kids in the city could rise instantly by 29 percent. The group’s commitment during the next four years will hopefully boost college graduation rates as well. And with Obama’s new education secretary, Arne Duncan, beating the same drum for more assistance for at-risk kids—he built his career championing community schools, with extensive after-hours programming and support for families—who knows how many could end up with a better jump-start in life?
—DIANA KAPP

Good idea #15: Give people a prize
After Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar for Best Picture, box-office sales more than doubled, jumping from $130 million worldwide before the statue to a near record-breaking $292 million one month afterward. Advance Blu-ray sales increased by 980 percent, and the soundtrack leapt from number 22 on the U.S. Top 100 to number 4.

When do-good organizations hand out plaques and paperweights (a practice made famous by the MacArthur Foundation and its “genius grants” but turned into an integral tool of social change by San Francisco foundations), they’re hoping that a similar wave of good tidings will crash over their prize winners. Not only do the prizes come with hefty cash rewards ($150,000 for a Goldman Environmental Prize, $125,000 for a James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award, and $10,000 for a San Francisco Foundation Community Lead­ership Award), but they also bring momentum, nods from other funders, and—maybe, just maybe—an emotional video biography narrated by Robert Redford. (That’s the Goldman Prize perk familiar to anyone who has attended the Oscars-like presentation at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco.) “It’s about the money, but prizes can also build credibility and distinction,” said Alexandra Kent, director of the San Francisco–based Civic Ventures’ Purpose Prize, an award program for social innovators older than 60.

In December 2008, Bay Area clinical psychologist Toni Heineman won a $10,000 Purpose Prize for responding to the disastrously common problem of foster kids’ changing therapists every time they move—hardly a trust-building routine. Heineman’s award-winning solution: Organize crews of professional therapists to each commit to one foster child for his or her entire lifetime. “That’s very different from ‘you’ll be here for seven sessions, or until you move to a new family, or until the funding changes,’” she says. “We work together until we’re finished.” She launched 10 new chapters of her group, A Home Within, around the nation in January, and she plans on 15 more next year. While the prize money will finance the group’s outreach, Heineman believes that the increased renown will bring in enough loose change to cover its operating costs.
—APRIL DEMBOSKY

Good idea #16: Recession? Resist.
It’s not news that nonprofits feel like they’ve been hit by a tsunami, but the details still pack a punch. Last October, 327 people were using the Career Link Center run by Goodwill Industries of San Francisco. That number doubled, then doubled again—and by March, it had hit 2,503. At Glide Memorial Church, visits to its free-meals program spiked by 20 percent in the last year. “Cecil Williams has been preaching at Glide for more than 45 years,” says Glide Foundation CEO Willa Seldon, “and he claims he’s never seen it as bad as this.”

Of course, donations have also hit the skids, so many nonprofits have no choice but to cut back just when people need help the most. At Glide, salad was the first casualty (fresh greens are expensive). The infant-care program also disappeared—important, but not as important as feeding people, the group decided.

That’s why Deborah Alvarez-Rodriguez, San Francisco Goodwill’s president and CEO, who has turned Goodwill into a nonprofit powerhouse, is such a brave soul. Instead of slashing services or laying people off, Alvarez-Rodriguez decided to expand again, even if it meant temporarily run­ning Goodwill at a deficit. “We can’t afford to have people with no options,” she says. To keep up with demand at the Career Link Center, she expanded its hours, replaced one-on-one orientations with a streaming video, and dramatically increased the number of workshops. She also launched Goodwill Business Services, which educates com­panies on the tax breaks and benefits of hiring people who go through Goodwill’s career program. Alvarez-Rodriguez has the air of a Broadway star—she’s plucky and upbeat and looks like she might break into song at any moment—which may explain her willingness to push the limits of sound fiscal policy, especially since she now has to run a huge capital campaign to make up for the shortfall. But she just doesn’t care. “The risk to society is too great,” she says.

Alvarez-Rodriguez isn’t the only risk-taker in the nonprofit world. Sara Ying Rounsaville, director of public affairs and communications at the San Francisco Foundation, says there are many “courageous” groups that, instead of asking, “What can we do to save our nonprofit?” are asking, “How can we continue to provide services to society’s most vulnerable people?” even if it means merging with other nonprofits to conserve resources, or closing their doors entirely.

Federal stimulus money has already begun to trickle into the local econ­omy, but some say it’s unlikely to make up for lost revenue that used to come from our now epically pinched city and state budgets. “There will be no single easy solution to the economic crisis,” says Alvarez-Rodriguez. “It’s only going to happen with businesses, nonprofits, and government working together.”
—HEATHER SMITH

Good idea #17: Cure our sick state
Some smaller foundations don’t mind political controversy, but the big guys are more cautious. They like their grants to be worthy but anodyne, like donations to support children’s healthcare or food for the homeless. But in California, leading foundations have decided to take on their government unapologetically.

“The system is broken,” explains Jim Canales, president and CEO of the James Irvine Foundation, one of five respected Bay Area foundations that kicked in nearly $16 million to create California Forward, a nonprofit with offices in Sacramento and San Franciso. California’s economy is bigger than that of all but six nations in the world, but for three decades, our state government has been held hostage by special interests, a right-wing minority, the ballot-intiative process, and leaders of all stripes who’ve pandered to an aging and increasingly cynical electorate. Without a functioning state government, the foundations decided, the kind of budgetary cataclysm we’re experiencing today will be a constant threat.

California Forward was created to inspire the sort of governmental housecleaning that the Soros foundations carry out in the most derelict third-world countries. “We do this in Africa,” says Jim Mayer, who heads California Forward. “We need to build democracy at home, too.” The fact that funders have joined forces only increases their power, says philanthropic veteran Tom Layton, of the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation. “Politicians might ask, ‘Why should I listen to this one foundation?’ They’re less likely to say that to five.”

Of course, these incautious grantmakers—the Bay Area–based Packard, Hewlett, Irvine, and Haas Foundations, along with the Los Angeles–based California Endowment—aren’t getting too muddy. To guarantee a hearing across party lines, California Forward assembled an almost absurdly bipartisan roster of political heavyweights, from its former cochair, CIA chief Leon Panetta, to Central Valley Republican Chuck Poochigian. And the foundations' millions go to the group’s policy-research arm, while the separate lobbying division has to hustle for private donations, like the $100,000 it raised last year to fix the status–quo preserving process by which the state draws legislative districts. The group is also pushing for a switch from single- to multiyear budgeting, which would prevent some of the gimmickry that legislators use to achieved balanced budgets.

Commonsensical stuff, you’d think, but not in Sacramento. Barbara O’Connor, of CSU Sacramento’s Institute for the Study of Politics and Media, argues that California Forward will also have to enlist the diverse mass of Californians to join the fight. “The group needs to take a page from Obama,” she says, “and structure its effort like a huge campaign.”
—CHRIS SMITH

Good idea #18: The no-charity charity
Foundations commonly fund nonprofits in their baby years, cooing over a fresh leader and a sexy approach before they move on to the next gurgling infant, leaving preteen organizations gasping for air. Recognizing this pitiless cycle of abandonment, the next generation of nonprofit leaders—many born of venture DNA—propose to stop pleading for donors altogether. After 11 years of growth, for example, San Francisco’s VolunteerMatch has forged a business model that eventually will require almost no charitable solicitation.

“We think more like a Silicon Valley startup than we do like a traditional charity,” says VolunteerMatch's president, Greg Baldwin. The web operation lets individuals look­ing to spend an afternoon at a soup kitchen or an animal shelter browse volunteer opportunities at more than 65,000 nonprofits across the country. That’s its main mission—but to pay the freight, VolunteerMatch has a business running the elaborate web portals that many companies create to promote do-gooding among their employees. The fees paid by these outfits—including Google, the Red Cross, and its earliest adopter, the Gap—now makes up close to 78 percent of VolunteerMatch’s $2.8 million day-to-day operating revenues, with total sustainability on the horizon.

The goal of a donor-free existence is now built into many nonprofits. Sausalito’s Chuck Slaughter sold his $100 million travelwear bus­iness and created Living Goods, an organization that hands out microloans to Ugan­dan women to buy essential items, like toothpaste, mosquito nets, condoms, and diarrhea medicine, which they sell door-to-door, Avon-style, to other women in their villages. Living Goods makes up to 15 percent on the products’ wholesale margin, which will eventually cover the entire cost of training, recruitment, and materials. Slaughter is proud of both sides of the equation, even if it makes defining his company a bit harder: “Are we a nonprofit or a social business? It’s an increasingly semantic question.”
—APRIL DEMBOSKY

Good idea #19: Cheer up: We're built to care
When someone says that humans are programmed to harm—rather than care for—one another, most Americans nod in agreement. After all, it’s easy to extrapolate from the headlines that people are hardwired for violence (terrorists in Mumbai), greed (AIG executives), or both.

Yet Bay Area academics are disproving this cynical assumption with hard science. Dacher Keltner, a psychologist who codirects UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, says that although negative emotions like anger get the bulk of scientific attention, a growing body of research proves that generosity, not monstrosity, carries the most neurological benefits. At a lab in Zurich, for example, researchers gave volunteers a nasal spray juiced up with the naturally occurring neuropeptide oxytocin, which is associated with pleasure, and then had them do money-sharing experiments. “The results showed the highest rate of profound generosity ever observed in the human species,” Keltner recently told an audience in Berkeley. “Half of the subjects give away their money: ‘Here, I’ll never see you again, I love you!’” At his center, Keltner’s research focuses on the neurological basis for such qualities as love, gratitude, compassion, and awe.

Stanford neurosurgeon Jim Doty also interprets this emerging science as a repudiation of the prevailing dark view of human nature. The Dalai Lama—who has a long-standing interest in how meditation alters the brain—donated $150,000 to help Doty form Stanford’s new Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. Youthful San Francisco philanthropist Lee Hwang has ponied up as well, giving Keltner’s center half a million dollars to market a message once spread by religious institutions. In our secular age, he says, goodness needs scientific cachet. The stakes are high, Keltner says: If society doesn’t recognize that we’re happier giving and sacrificing, rather than buying stuff and becoming socially isolated, then “we’re in dire trouble.”
—JOCELYN WIENER