Video Transcript
“Hi, I’m Grant Oliphant, CEO of the Prebys Foundation in San Diego, California. And I’m here today to talk with you about how we’re seeing the changing nature of pressure on our nonprofit community and how we’re attempting to respond in the present environment. Now, you may remember, for those of you in this community, that we started the year by hosting a webinar where we talked about everything that we saw coming and how we were going to try to respond during the course of the year.
What I want to do now is lay out for you the five point plan that the Foundation has adopted to attempt to respond to this environment as we have gotten smarter about it. Before I dive into that, I do want to just acknowledge how important it is. The work that the nonprofit community is doing both here and around the country.
It is in the best tradition of American civil society. You are doing the hard work of keeping compassion and caring and our bedrock American values alive in a way that no one else in society has the capacity to do. You are the instrument of hope for a society desperately in need of that. And we at the Prebys Foundation deeply acknowledge and value that, which is why we continue to listen and engage and to evolve our thinking about how best to respond.
So let’s dive into what we are attempting to do. And maybe as a context, it would help to know that the first thing the Foundation recognized was that we would need to dig deeper into our resources than we normally would. Even though we’re a very new foundation, we decided to increase our spending for the year an initial $23 million above our standard spending.
So that we would have more resources to be able to respond to the extraordinary demands that nonprofits are feeling, not only as they come under pressure from funding cuts, but also as they come under attack for doing the very valuable work that they do. So that was the first step. But then we realized that what we’ve always known, which is that money is just one part of the equation and how we use it in partnership with our grantee organizations and partners is really the key.
And for that, we identified five key components that are guiding us right now in our thinking about this. One is that we are looking at how to provide technical assistance and capacity building and leadership development for our sector. Our sector is asking and being forced to ask a lot of very difficult questions about how to come together, how to respond, and how to make the most with very little.
And we are making resources available to help to answer those questions and to strengthen the sector at a time when it may be feeling weakened. The second is advocacy and legal support. Many organizations that we support, or areas of work that we care about are under attack right now, and they need additional assistance to defend themselves, to talk about the value of the work that they do, and even sometimes to engage legal assistance.
So we are looking at how to make that available as well. The third piece for us is what we call convenings and consultations, which in many ways is the traditional role that foundations often play. But here we’re talking about doing it in partnership with the broader community and with partners, where we are coming together to look at the issues that we jointly face and to figure out the best possible solutions that we can together, and to hear from the best experts, both locally and from around the country, about how we might move forward in the most effective way that we possibly can.
The fourth piece of this for us is what we call continuous feedback loops. And that’s not just the foundation in concert with the community. It’s actually the entire community learning from the national scene and having access to the best type of thinking that we all can get. Hearing about what’s working and understanding what isn’t so that in real time we can react in the ways that we need to.
The fifth element of this, for us is about amplifying nonprofit voices in many ways, the most important voices in this entire process of responding to the threats to civil society in America, right now involves allowing the nonprofit sector and civil society more broadly, to be heard in ways that it isn’t necessarily being heard. So the people that organizations help, the organizations themselves, the things that they are seeing and experiencing, helping those stories be heard by more people is a particularly effective way we think of helping to amplify the voice and need of the sector in this environment.
What we hope through these five elements is that we will strengthen the leadership of our sector and the understanding of our sector at a time, as I said, where it is under attack and where its funding is being cut in unprecedented ways. We believe in the work of the nonprofit sector in San Diego. We believe in the work of the organizations that we are privileged to partner with, and we are grateful for the partnership of our nonprofit colleagues and for the partnership of other foundations, both here in San Diego, around California and around the country, who are making similar moves to step up together in solidarity for this great part of American society and for the values we all believe in.”
