Community Foundation Reduces Workforce

In 2008, Silicon Valley Community Foundation enjoyed many successes. We rolled out new grantmaking strategies. Our Strengthen the Safety Net campaign and related efforts raised over $5.2 million to support food and shelter organizations in our region. The total grantmaking for the community foundation from our fund advisors, corporate partners and endowment exceeded $260 million. And our first Regional Meeting was attended by 1,300 people eager to reconnect with the community foundation and help us fulfill our vision to address the community’s most challenging issues.

Unfortunately, despite these accomplishments, the community foundation has not been immune from the current economic crisis. The community foundation pays for nearly all of its operating costs by charging fees on assets. Our total assets declined by 22 percent in 2008 due to the deterioration of the financial markets. In addition, although we raised $190 million in donations to the community foundation, this represented a 36 percent decrease from the previous year. The combined result of these factors was a decrease in the community foundation’s total assets from $1.9 billion to $1.5 billion in the last 12 months.

We have responded to this bleak economic environment by freezing salaries, putting a hold on open positions, reducing retirement benefits by 50 percent, asking staff to absorb increases in medical insurance costs, and making the difficult decision not to renew the lease on the San Jose office space among other cost saving measures. Unfortunately, these cost-saving efforts have not been sufficient and we have made the difficult decision to lay-off 14 staff members, which represents 14 percent of our workforce.

The decision to lay-off staff was not taken lightly and we are mindful of the hardships that this will present to our friends and colleagues and their families. In deciding where to make these cuts, we have taken care to minimize the impact that these staff reductions will have on fund advisors or on our ability to effectively partner with nonprofit organizations.

Repositioning, while difficult, will ensure we can continue to do the important work of the community foundation going forward. As we look to the remainder of 2009, we are pleased that we will be able to maintain grantmaking of $8 million from our endowment in support of our established strategies to improve the region.