MARGOT RAWLINS
INITIATIVE OFFICER, CENTER FOR VENTURE PHILANTHROPY™

Margot is an initiative officer with Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s Center for Venture Philanthropy™. She serves as program manager for Fostering the Future, the Center’s social venture fund to improve outcomes for youth in kinship care and in or emancipated from foster care. She also manages the popular Venture Van™ series of tours designed to help philanthropists learn about regional issues and the nonprofits working to address those issues.

When she joined the Peninsula Community Foundation in 2000, Margot assumed responsibility for the Center’s first social venture fund, the Assets for All Alliance. This fund provided a set of tools to help low-income families accumulate and retain assets as a means of joining the economic mainstream. In 2005, this fund closed, exceeding its goals and providing data that guided the increase of national individual development accounts, or IDA’s, as a successful means to combat poverty. Today, the Center's nonprofit partners such as Lenders for Community in Development, a San José-based nonprofit, continue to offer the community this powerful poverty-fighting tool.

Margot has been a community leader on the Peninsula for many years serving in leadership capacities with TheatreWorks, the Environmental Volunteers, the Junior League of the Palo Alto - Mid-Peninsula, the Girls Middle School and other nonprofits. Prior to moving back to her home base of the Bay area, she served as director of public affairs at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. She is a graduate of the University of Colorado and received her MBA in health management from Golden Gate University.

Weekends find her outdoors working on her family ranch with her husband, birding with her daughter or riding her horse through the hills with her trusty border terrier at her side.