50 Years. One Foundation.

Last year, we celebrated a milestone, Community Foundation Silicon Valley’s 50th Anniversary. As we looked at our history, it became clear that our primary mission is to be ready and responsive to the community’s most pressing needs. Who in the agricultural region of 50 years ago would have imagined our housing crisis of today? Who would have envisioned that California’s schools – once considered the best in the nation – would face such challenges? How do we build resources for tomorrow’s needs?

In honor of this anniversary, Jeff Skoll and the Skoll Foundation made a $5 million challenge grant to Community Foundation Silicon Valley to create the Community Investment Fund, a savings account for current and future local needs. In this report, you’ll meet some of the donors who are supporting this fund, and you’ll meet some of the people benefiting from its grants.

The Community Investment Fund is just one way in which we’re investing in our community’s future. Unlike a more traditional foundation, we don’t do it alone. The Community Foundation isn’t a monolithic entity. We’re a family of funds – more than 600 in fact – and each fund has its own focus and philanthropic direction. Like Silicon Valley, our funds are diverse, created by people of all ages, ethnicities, religions, and political views.

Together these funds give more than $1.5 million per week to the community, both locally and elsewhere. In the last 50 years, the Community Foundation has distributed more than $500 million dollars in grants to worthy projects.

One such project is Young Readers – Future Leaders, a collaboration of the region’s early literacy providers. To date, we’ve placed mini-libraries in 65 community centers and neighborhoods, reaching thousands of small children. We brought together more than 800 parents, teachers, and day-care providers to learn how to build literacy skills.

Our Advancing the Arts Initiative has gotten off the ground with support from the James Irvine and David and Lucile Packard Foundations. It funds small and mid-size arts groups and connects donors with arts organizations.

During this year, we released Familia, Fé y Comunidad, which looked at giving and volunteering in the Latino community, in partnership with the Hispanic Foundation of Silicon Valley.

The third Nonprofit Benchmark Study, conducted in partnership with CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, looked at the health of the nonprofit sector in Silicon Valley. This study encouraged us to overhaul our grants program. In July 2005, we began to provide general operating support grants, giving our nonprofits the flexible dollars they need to serve the community.

This annual report also includes the generous response of our donors to the tsunami that devastated several countries in December. In the time since that tragedy, we have seen more devastation, from Katrina and other hurricanes, to the earthquake in South Asia. We have become more aware of how small and interconnected our world is. We have come to know that poverty is not a far away problem, that here in the richest nation on the planet, many families live without the basic resources we so often take for granted.

And we have seen that people who care will respond generously to help those in need.

That, at its heart, is why communities need community foundations. We connect people who care with causes that matter, making it easy, efficient, and fulfilling to give back. Today… and for generations to come.

Sincerely,

Greg Avis, Chair, Board of Directors

Peter Hero, President