CEO Nicole Taylor looks at the busy intersection of Silicon Valley

Nicole Taylor has an insider’s view of philanthropic trends as president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The Mountain View, California-based community foundation donated nearly $4.6 billion in 2023, a significant increase from the previous year’s $2.6 billion.

This increase is thanks to some major donors “who really went above and beyond on some of the things they cared about,” Taylor said.

She said it was difficult to predict what would happen this year. “Will there be more wars? We have big elections coming up. We fully expected donors to be active. Will it be $4 billion again? It’s hard to say.”

The foundation does not comment on specific donors or donations, but its reported giving shows that its clients include some of the richest and most powerful people in Silicon Valley, including meta-CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, other Facebook alumni and those whose fortunes come from the booming artificial intelligence business.

Taylor, who became the first Black woman to lead the foundation when she joined in December 2018, spoke to the Associated Press about the role of philanthropy in democracy, threats to advancing racial justice and the growth of giving funds. The interview has been edited.

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Q: A large and growing share of donations go to donor-advised funds. How does SVCF get donors to actually direct these funds to charities?

A: Donor funds have allowed many, many people to get in the game, as I like to call it. They’ve been able to get off the sidelines and get in the game and really make an impact that they couldn’t before. You don’t have to be rich. You don’t have to start your own private foundation and you can accumulate some funds and spend them or spend them immediately.

We don’t really have to do much to get our donors to give. … We’ve set up issue funds so that if they’re not quite sure what they want to give to, they can give to our housing fund or immigration fund. Or we have a civic engagement fund or a journalism fund. … And then we have an inactive fund policy. If you’re not giving out grants after two years, we take the money and put it in our community fund.

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Q: Some fear that donations to DAFs will go unused, and this reflects the fear of inequality in our society.

A: That’s bizarre, because the questions should be about the private foundations. And I say that all the time to my colleagues at the private foundations. I say, “All of you are sitting on your assets.” We’re not sitting on our assets. You’re getting out. … There’s a billion dollars sitting in the private foundations, and they only have to pay out a fraction of it every year. I’m going to harp on that, because that’s the cause of the concern. Why are they getting away with it? And people are worried about a $25,000 DAF that’s giving out $5,000 grants every year. Because that’s the size of the DAFs we’re talking about. And if you want to talk about the largest ones we’ve had, they’re the most active of all of our donors, and they’re the ones that are committing significant funds every year. Hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

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Q: That has ended affirmative action on college campuses. What are the real risks for nonprofits working for racial justice?

A: There’s a lot of fear, even though the decisions were very close and they affected college admissions. The fear and some of the lawsuits that have already been filed are real, they’re palpable. People are worried. … Now is not the time to retreat. Now is not the time to turn away from communities of color and communities that have faced systematic inequality for decades, for hundreds of years. We’ve started figuring out how to prepare organizations for what they can do, what they can say, where legal attacks might happen and what kind of legal training they need and what preparation they need for that. So we actually launched a fund through the California Black Freedom Fund, which we’re incubating right now. It’s a legal education and advocacy fund, so LEAD, and it specifically looks at racial justice issues and organizations that work in that space. There are funding resources, legal experts and advocacy experts come to the table and they’re training nonprofit leaders in the state of California on that.

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Q: How are you reaching out to your donors ahead of the November election?

A: We in Silicon Valley like to joke that we are the ATM for both political parties. Our region is very busy right now with elections. And it’s not just the presidential election. There are congressional elections and local elections too. A lot of people are very active during election season and very interested in civic participation.

As far as donor events go, we’re actually going to have a couple of them in June. One on civic engagement and one on the role of local journalism and democracy and where people get their information. And if English isn’t your first language, where do you get information about voting, about registering, about how to get involved and get involved? And again, not just at the national level. You get to have a say in who gets elected to your child’s school board.

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Q: Silicon Valley is also home to social media platforms and technology companies that have contributed to the deterioration of our information ecosystem. Do your donors think about this?

A: We’re at a very interesting intersection here in the Valley. Our donors are very conscious of the impact of technology on information and civic engagement, both positively and negatively. They’re very, very aware of that and want to make sure they can help advance the positive in terms of civic engagement and combating disinformation.