Northern California Grantmakers

NCG member Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) is currently conducting a Corporate Citizenship Survey. If you are a corporate funder, please consider taking a few minutes to help advance corporate citizenship by participating in this survey.

The purpose of this survey is to better understand how Bay Area companies are engaging in citizenship both locally and globally through philanthropy, employee engagement and other activities. The goal is to analyze responses in the context of the social and economic needs of the Bay Area, compare local corporate activity to national trends and to identify some of the most promising and innovative practices underway. The findings will be published in a report which will debut in December and will be shared with all participants.

The SVCF will be accepting partial responses for all surveys.

For more information, please contact us at bizservices@siliconvalleycf.org. The survey will close on July 19, 2013.

Take the survey now.

On Tuesday, May 20, 2013, the San Francisco Chronicle published the following article: Muslims Become Part of Bay Area Fabric, which highlights a benchmark study that gives demographic data on the Bay Area’s growing Muslim community. The study, The Bay Area Muslim Study: Establishing Identity and Community, provides compelling data on the Bay Area Muslim community’s demographics, sense of identity, economic well-being, political and civic engagement, and the challenges it faces, such as eradicating Islamophobia.

Nearly 250,000 Muslims – one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in the United States – live, work and contribute to the economies and communities of the Bay Area (3.5 percent of the area’s population); yet little is known about the demographics and issues that Bay Area Muslim communities face–issues that are often left under the radar.

On May 15th NCG members Silicon Valley Community Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation, the Marin Community Foundation, along with Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy hosted a funder briefing: “Inclusive Philanthropic Strategies and the Bay Area’s Diverse Muslim Populations” to shed light on the specific opportunities and challenges of this community by sharing data from this first-of-its-kind research study with other funders.

The study was prepared by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding and funded by One Nation Bay Area, a partnership of the above-mentioned Bay Area organizations that aims to strengthen relationships between the region’s Muslims and non-Muslims.

Some highlights from the May 15th event include the following compelling pieces of data:

• The Bay Area Muslim community is highly diverse across race; 30% are South Asian, 23% are Arabs, 17% are Afghans, 9% are African American, 7% are Asian/Pacific Islanders, 6% are white and 2% are Iranian.
• Education attainment levels of Muslims are high; 41% age 25 or older have a B.A. or higher (16.3%).
• There are major income disparities between the Muslim communities living and working in Silicon Valley and other bay area counties.

The major challenges for the Bay Area Muslim community include:
• Islamophobia
• Conflict in Muslim-Majority Counties
• Media Portrayals of American Muslims

Finally a few takeaways and implications for philanthropy highlighted at the briefing:

• The need for organizational capacity building grants; Muslim NGOs are often run on very lean volunteer staff and lack infrastructure
• The need for social services to address the diverse needs of Bay Area Muslim communities (such as immigration services, drug abuse, post traumatic stress disorder)
• The need for social services for the influx of Afghan refugees in this country
• The need for more data to engage the funding community
• The need to understand who is at the table and who is not
• The need for NGO assistance in leveraging relationships with other funders and help with grant writing

To learn more about this program, please visit NCG’s website. To obtain a copy of the newly published study and executive summary, please follow the provided links.

The following blog post on corporate volunteerism, written by San Diego Grantmakers (SDG) Director of Communications Michelle Slingerland, is a featured article in NCG’s current Corporate Contributions Roundtable (CCR) newsletter.

April 21-27 marked National Volunteer Week.  How did your company celebrate its employee volunteers?

We know how important volunteer service programs are, not only to companies, but to communities as well.  So to continue that recognition, we dedicate this section to all things employee volunteering.

Still Trying to Make the Case for Employee Volunteer Programs?

• According to the Trends Of Excellence In Employee Volunteering Series by Points of Light Institute, a company will spend about $416 on each person that participates in an employee volunteer program. That’s significantly lower than the $1,200 that it costs per employee for one training program (via human resources think tank Bersin and Associates). And consider the morale and productivity it creates…

• True Impact’s 2013 Volunteerism ROI Tracker Report found that, among other things, employee volunteer programs strengthen the “social capital” – i.e., the personal networks and relationships that generate engagement.  Furthermore, “programs that nurture human interactions are key to engaged employees, locally, remotely, and globally.”

Determining the Value of Employee Volunteerism

• The Independent Sector, a nonpartisan coalition of approximately 600 nonprofits, foundations, and corporate giving programs, uses a strategy based on the average hourly earnings of all production and non-supervisory workers on private non-farm payrolls (as determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

• In the article “Time Is Money: How to Measure the Value of Volunteers” (The Chronicle of Philanthropy, March 14, 2013), Diane Knoepke of Mission Measurement suggests a formula for determining the net value of your employee volunteers’ time.

• The Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship offers a confidential, custom benchmark report that compares a company’s own employee volunteering and giving programs against the Drivers of Effectiveness for Employee Volunteering and Giving Programs, as well as against other companies.

• The Maximizing Corporate Community Investments (MCCI) education program module about corporate volunteerism (developed by the Forum of Regional Associations in association with TCC Group).

• This list of volunteerism resources can help identify local volunteer opportunities for individuals as well as groups. They may also provide additional information about community organizations and issues facing the community.

• Reimagining Service has corporate research about using employee volunteer engagement to achieve social impact.

• Volunteering on nonprofit boards:
  • LinkedIn Board Connect helps nonprofit leaders quickly identify quality professionals to join their boards…and helps professionals identify nonprofit boards they might wish to join.
  • BoardSource’s governance education program, the Certificate of Nonprofit Board Education, is for new and potential board members and covers fundamental nonprofit governance concepts.

• Making it Count: How to Measure the Impact of Volunteerism (January 2011). This report, commissioned by Starbucks Coffee Company and conducted by Mission Measurement, seeks to build a meaningful, yet practical and widely applicable, framework to identify and measure the social impact and business value of volunteerism.

• Deloitte Volunteer IMPACT Survey (2011).  This research from Deloitte suggests a powerful link between frequent participation in workplace volunteer activities and several measures of employee engagement that, in turn, contribute to employees’ perceptions of positive corporate culture.  The survey results may also serve as a sample survey for companies to gauge their own employees’ satisfaction with workplace giving and volunteer programs.