Our Challenge
Our community is on the wrong track.
Silicon Valley boasts a world-changing culture of innovation, a beautiful natural environment, and a reputation for boundless opportunity. It's home to more than 148,000 millionaires and billionaires.
Yet this is not a place of shared prosperity. A third of the people who live here cannot meet their basic needs without help. The number of homeless people in Silicon Valley outstrips San Francisco and continues to grow. Just miles away from some of the best schools in the country, the majority of third graders struggle to read. Due to soaring costs, many well-regarded nonprofits can't pay their rent or retain staff, even as demand increases for their services.
But here's the good news: we can make a difference.
In Silicon Valley, we know how to tackle hard problems. Just as our start-ups are changing the world, innovative and resilient community organizations are developing new ways to solve age-old challenges and leverage scarce resources. They are feeding, housing, mentoring, and training vulnerable people; preserving our environment; caring for our seniors; changing policy to sustain and improve our quality of life, and more.
Magnify Community works with local leaders and philanthropists to change the way Silicon Valley donors think about investing in their community. We are working together to catalyze $100 million in additional giving to nonprofit organizations serving Silicon Valley by 2023.
By making local giving the norm, we aim to foster enduring investment that will make Silicon Valley a vibrant community for generations to come.
Shining a Spotlight on the Issues
1 in 3
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One third of families living in Silicon Valley need assistance to make ends meet.
4 jobs
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Parents with 2 young children would need 4 full-time minimum wage jobs to make ends meet in Silicon Valley.
11,218
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11,218 people are homeless in Silicon Valley, far more than in San Francisco.
< 10%
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Less than ten percent of Silicon Valley philanthropy impacts local families and communities.
1st 48,000
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Silicon Valley is home to 148,000 millionaires and billionaires.
Our Story
Rich with philanthropic resources but starved for local investment.
The groundbreaking Giving Code report on philanthropy in the region documented a startling gap: less than 10% of Silicon Valley philanthropy is directed to organizations serving the local community, despite increasing wealth, growing income disparities, expanding local needs, and a nonprofit sector struggling to meet rising costs.
The report also documented a massive untapped resource: the billions of dollars earmarked for philanthropy in donor-advised funds that could be deployed locally if donors understood more about how and why to give to Silicon Valley nonprofits.
In response to these findings, the David & Lucile Packard, Grove, Heising-Simons, Sand Hill, Sobrato, and Sunlight Giving foundations came together to challenge the status quo and catalyze local giving.
The result of their commitment is Magnify Community, which launched in September 2018, as a three-year initiative. Our approach is to identify promising ideas, test, learn, refine, and bring solutions that would increase local giving at a whole new scale.
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Photo Credit
Second Harvest Food Bank