Northern California Grantmakers

Struggling to Make Ends Meet in the Bay Area, a new report released by NCG member the United Way of the Bay Area, used the California Self-Sufficiency Standard to measure the economic well-being of families in our region.

The report “found that many households require three full-time minimum wage jobs just to pay for basic needs.” [emphasis added]

Even before the global economic crisis, having a job was not a guarantee of adequate income as 86% of Bay Area households with incomes below the Self-Sufficiency Standard had at least one worker.

The Self-Sufficiency Standard measures the actual cost of living for different household types of working age in each county, including costs for housing, food, health care, taxes and child care. These 440,000 households with sub-Standard income are neither a small nor marginal group, and are more than three times the number defined as poor by the Federal Poverty Level (FPL). Because many government and social programs use the FPL or variants of FPL to determine eligibility, a large and diverse group of struggling individuals and families is routinely overlooked and undercounted.

These hidden poor subsist in a “policy gap” where they earn too much income to qualify for most supports yet still struggle to meet their most basic needs, especially as the costs of housing, health care and other necessities continue to outpace increases in income.

Read the full report online.

FSG Social Impact Advisors announced today the release of Community-Based Philanthropy and the Knight Community Information Challenge, supported by and produced in collaboration with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

This report explores how quality and delivery of information—specifically the shift from traditional print media to online and social media—will affect the health and vitality of communities. It also examines how place-based foundations are responding to Knight’s $24 million Community Information Challenge to incorporate their communities’ information needs into their missions.

Download the report online.

Mark Rosenman, Director of Caring to Change, and Peter Panepento, The Chronicle of Philanthropy‘s Web Editor and host of The Chronicle’s Philanthropy This Week podcast, discuss how foundations can effect more change by adopting a broader mindset instead of focusing in on specific issues.

Listen to the podcast interview online.

Read the Foundations for the Common Good report that explores “how grantmaking might better serve a foundation’s mission while holding even broader benefit.”