2025 End of Year Message from our CEO Grant Oliphant

As 2025 comes to a close, Grant Oliphant, President and CEO of the Prebys Foundation, reflects on a year marked by significant challenge and extraordinary resilience. In this message to the community, he shares how the foundation responded to a shifting landscape, why long-term commitments still matter in hard times, and how Prebys is organizing its work for the year ahead.

At a glance

• 2025 tested our sector. Unprecedented government funding cuts, economic pressure, and cultural shifts created real strain for nonprofits and families.
• The community responded with resilience. Across San Diego, organizations adapted, collaborated, and kept moving forward.
• Prebys leaned in. We increased spending by $25 million, deepened partnerships, and committed to transparency.
• The work continues. From the Tijuana River Valley to housing, healing, journalism, and downtown San Diego, long-term challenges remain front and center.
• Looking ahead to 2026. Our focus: strengthening the core, solving big problems, and inventing the future together.

Below is a transcript of the video message from Grant Oliphant, President and CEO of the Prebys Foundation.

Hi, I’m Grant Oliphant, and I’m privileged to serve as president and CEO of the Prebys Foundation. And I just want to deliver a few thoughts as we end the year and wish you what I hope will be a fulfilling and happy holiday season and New Year.

We want to acknowledge that 2025 was a really challenging time, and I think it’s important, as we wrap up this year, to think about the ways in which a combination of cuts in government funding at unprecedented levels, economic pressures on nonprofits and families that continue to compound and play out, and shifts in the cultural climate have all created a really challenging environment for foundations and, more importantly, for the organizations that we’re privileged to work with.

What has struck me throughout this year is how resilient our community is. We repeatedly see over and over again a capacity for our organizations and institutions and community more broadly to respond to these pressures by rebounding and rethinking and reconfiguring, and that extraordinary resilience needs to be acknowledged. And from my perspective and our perspective at Prebys, we’re grateful for it.

At the Prebys Foundation, our response has been to really lean in to acknowledging what’s going on. We decided during the course of the year to increase our spending for the year by $25 million. We came together with partners in the community like Price Philanthropies and the San Diego Foundation and Alliance Healthcare to work collaboratively on a host of issues. And we really formed deeper partnerships with many of the organizations in our community that are advancing our aligned work. And we also just were transparent about how we responded and how we adjusted during the course of the year. Communicating openly about our perspective has been an important part of our response.

I think as we look back, we’re very proud of the way in which this foundation has responded authentically and courageously to the pressures that we have felt and that many of the organizations we work with have felt.

That said, I think it’s important also to acknowledge that, as a foundation and as a community, I don’t think any of us have defaulted to just responding. What we’ve seen with the organizations we fund and with our own work is that we have collectively remained committed to working on the big challenges that are opportunities to move our community forward.

And certainly at Prebys, one of the things that we have done is continue to deepen our work on issues like the Tijuana River Valley and the crying need to remedy that century-long shame, public health violation that we’ve seen there; to improve the Civic Center and reimagine our downtown as the sort of ²⁴⁄₇ creative, dynamic downtown that San Diego deserves; to look differently at the challenges of healing in our community through our Healing Through initiative to bring art and nature into the equation so that we’re looking at how to engage the amazing assets of San Diego as tools for creating a more healthy and dynamic community; addressing our critical housing shortage through the work of the Partnership to House San Diego and the collaborative work that has been done by our anchor institutions and religious institutions to think about how to put their resources into play on behalf of housing.

The work we’ve done on the journalism front to get San Diego’s journalism community aligned and stronger as it faces the extraordinary pressures that it has, and of course the power of the nonprofit community to assert its leadership and to build its capacity in the face of the challenges that it’s been working on. So, in many ways, we have not been responding or just not responding alone. We’ve been leaning into thinking about how to continue to fight for the big issues that will define San Diego’s future.

And I’m very hopeful, as we emerge at the end of 2025, that this community has demonstrated that we’ve got what it takes to define an even better future.

That said, I think I need to acknowledge that the situation will remain tough for the nonprofit community for the foreseeable future. I think it is a practical reality that the things that have changed in many respects are going to stay changed and different for a long time. And in some cases, maybe that’s an opportunity for us to reinvent and rethink systems that weren’t working in the first place and really begin to lean into how to improve them.

So, as we look forward to 2026, what we see is the opportunity to organize our work around three priorities. One of those priorities is to strengthen the core of what we believe really defines the essence of San Diego and the critical organizations and systems that allow us to move San Diego forward. We’re using the term strengthen advisedly, because it doesn’t mean necessarily stay the same. It means to make sure that they are strong, but also dynamic and able to evolve in keeping with a new set of circumstances and maybe an even loftier set of goals about the outcomes that they serve.

Second on this list for us, as we think about the three priorities that we’re looking forward to, is continuing to solve big problems. San Diego cannot take its eye off the ball when it comes to challenges like I mentioned earlier with the Civic Center or the Tijuana River Valley, or addressing issues around integrating our natural and artistic assets with our mental health challenges in the community. We need to bring these forces together and really focus on how to solve big problems. Because if San Diego can position itself as the place in America that remains confident about the future and demonstrates the art of the possible, then we can be leaders not just here, but also for the entire country.

And then third, the priority that we’re thinking about is how to invent the future, because one of the responsibilities that we all still have, even in hard times, is to think about what comes next for San Diego. Previous generations have done this, and they laid the groundwork for us to have the extraordinary life sciences community that we do here, the incredible educational assets that we do have in this community. And we all have to be thinking about what that next iteration of that combination of assets looks like. As we look forward to building our blue economy and our green economy, and thinking about how we take the exceptional health assets that we have in this community, and not just preserving them, but building them into something that is a more powerful force for community wellness and well-being.

So we’ll be thinking about these three things — strengthening the core, solving big challenges, and inventing the future — throughout the year in 2026, and we’ll be talking to you about that.

We’ll also be in 2026 focusing even more deeply on issues around how we learn from our work, not just we alone, but in partnership with all of you, and how we communicate about our work. Because we believe, as we’ve said so many times, that putting all of our assets into play, including the way in which we invest our money and the way in which we talk about our work, are extensions of how we have impact as a foundation.

And we’ll also be thinking differently about how we make grants in the community and evolving the approach that we take with respect to that. We will be leaning much more into inviting proposals from organizations that are working in aligned ways on shared strategies with us, but we will always continue to maintain open avenues so that we can learn about new organizations and new ideas and not miss the opportunity to learn from those and to learn from you.

So what I want to say as we end the year is that what San Diego has demonstrated in 2025 is exceptional resilience, creativity in the face of a storm, and a real commitment to leaning into a promising future. And we are going to try and build on that track record in 2026 so that together we are moving San Diego forward in a way that I think not only San Diego will want, but that the country desperately needs examples of.

So thank you for your extraordinary work. We are honored to get to be engaged in this work with you. I hope you have a terrific end to the year, a wonderful start to the new year, and happy holidays.