The Giving Gap

How Marin’s nonprofits cope in the land of plenty

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Bifurcation. Now there’s a word most people don’t toss about in everyday conversation. Tom Peters, though, head of the Marin Community Foundation, uses it a lot when he talks about issues such as:

* Health care: “The gap that exists in access to health care is a really serious, serious issue, a bifurcation.”

* The environment: “Another bifurcation is the gap between rhetoric and practice on environmental issues. We have a giant footprint.”

* Economic disparity: “By and large Marin is a pretty segregated community (and) when you live cheek by jowl with people whose lives are way more comfortable, way more cared for than yours, then the struggles of your life are in sharper contrast. What would it be like to see somebody else take their child to a pediatrician at first sniffle and you have to struggle to get your own child with a serious health problem to a doctor? That contrast is rough. The bifurcation and layering of Marin is one of our real ethical challenges.”

These divisions, these fault lines between the comfort of Marin’s many haves and the discomfort of its (surprisingly) many have nots, form a gash that slashes through all aspects of the community—from housing to health, from education to environment. Bridging this gap are local charities, nonprofit organizations that feed the poor, nurture the old and protect the abused. In the broadest sense, they plug holes in an increasingly tattered social safety net that government cannot (or chooses not to) maintain on its own.

“Even though this is Marin County, there is incredible need here,” says Linda Davis, head of the Center for Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership in San Rafael. “Just because it’s so wealthy doesn’t mean it’s not there. Nonprofits fill that need.”

Marin’s charitable resources

Building a bridge across the giving gap requires three ongoing components: effective charitable organizations, money to pay those organizations’ bills and willingness by haves to write a check (or donate their time) for the have nots.

Marin has plenty of all three.

It has almost as many non-profits as Porsches and Priuses. In fact, a study by Davis’s group found that Marin has more nonprofits per capita than anywhere else in California, one for every 136 people, or one for every eight poor people. (What’s poor? Eight percent of Marin lives under the poverty line of $20,444 for a family of four; 20 percent of local families make less than $50,000.) Of course, not all nonprofits are charities. The Belvedere Tennis Club, for example, is a nonprofit.

Marin also has money, much more than most places. Households that make more than $200,000 are six times as common here (20 percent) as in the nation as a whole. Per-capita income ($49,000) is twice the national level. Million-and-up starter homes in the right neighborhood are considered bargains.

Marin is also generous. A new Marin Community Foundation study concluded that “giving and volunteerism is thriving” here. Some examples:

• 92 percent of Marin residents either volunteered or donated money in the last year, up from 87 percent in 2000.

• 86 percent of households made charitable contributions, up from 80 percent in 2000 and beyond the national average of 70 percent.

• Marin households gave an average of 2.3 percent of income to charity, a touch more than the national average of 2.2 percent.

All that giving adds up. That clank of coins you tossed in the bell-ringer’s bucket just before Christmas or that $40 check for a MALT membership, plus the heftier sums charities seek from the government and deep-pocketed, private foundations, equals enough money to run several good-size cities—20 of them in fact. In 2007, Marin nonprofits took in at least $1.8 billion, 20 times the city budget of San Rafael, according to a review of 1,236 nonprofit tax returns by the National Center for Charitable Statistics.

Where does all that money go? The Marin Community Foundation study found that most inividual Marin donors (58 percent) give to human service organizations (the Family Services Agency or Canal Alliance, for example) and education groups (Kiddo!, e.g.), environmental organizations (48 percent) and religious groups (46 percent). Other categories included politics (39 percent), arts (35 percent) and the aged (28 percent).

As always, the numbers tell an incomplete story. They don’t show the faces of the Marin children whose next meal is coming from a government-issued can of peanut butter. They don’t speak of the local women who seek refuge from the fists of their abusive husbands in a nonprofit shelter. They don’t take us inside the shuttered homes of the old and infirm forced to choose between a doctor’s visit and decent housing. Tom Wilson, executive director of Canal Alliance, which serves San Rafael’s Latino immigrant community, puts it succinctly: “We see people every day who go without health care. We see people every day who go without food. We see people every day who can’t afford housing. And we’re talking about working people here.”

Feeding a need

Food is the most basic of human needs, so perhaps nowhere are Marin’s economic fault lines more visible than inside the cavernous Novato warehouse of the Marin Community Food Bank. Some 2 million pounds of fresh, prepared and frozen food come into and out of this nondescript building every year, a flow of life-enhancing charity to emergency pantries, the elderly and other nonprofits that is sustained by more than $1.2 million in private and public donations, the hands-on largesse of 600 local volunteers and the energetic savvy of Anne Rogers.

A South Carolina transplant whose soft native accent belies the formidable sense of urgency with which she speaks, Rogers is not one to dwell on yesterday when tomorrow is another day with more hungry people in it.

In the world of nonprofits, where other people’s money is as necessary as air, financial uncertainty is a given. But for Rogers and managers of other Marin charities, a change of strategy by the county’s single largest source of funding—the Marin Community Foundation—has elevated everyday uncertainty to nerve-rattling anxiety.

“We’re really very nervous,” says Rogers. “I’m going to be 70 years old in May and this is my 26th year. The foundation has given us a great deal of money through the years and I would no way minimize that, but if we get our funding cut to the quick, I don’t know how we’re going to provide the quality of service we’re proud of. You don’t want to feel that any child goes to bed hungry.”

Indeed, the food bank has already lost more than half the $250,000 it had become accustomed to getting annually from the Marin Community Foundation and it could lose more. And that’s what worries Rogers, even though nearly 60 percent of the group’s income comes from individual donations.

The Marin Community Foundation

Discussions about charitable giving in Marin County inevitably turn to (or often begin with) the Marin Community Foundation. To call the foundation the 800-pound gorilla in the local philanthropic jungle does not do justice to its size and influence. It’s fair to say that nearly every Marin nonprofit is affected by the foundation one way or another. The seed of the foundation was the $9.1 million that Ross matron Beryl Buck left in a trust in 1975 to be used for the benefit of local residents. After a fortuitous turn in the stock market and a litigious interlude over control of the money, the trust metastasized into hundreds of millions, and the Marin Community Foundation was formed to manage it in 1986.

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