In January 2018, my husband, David Morris, and I settled into our house on the Point Reyes Station mesa. Because we had spent a month or more a year in West Marin, we were familiar with the communitarian richness of the region. We had rented our house to our longtime friend Jonathan Rowe and his family and cherished the work he and others did to create the West Marin Commons. Friends also familiarized us with the myriad nonprofits that advocate for all things important to our collective good.
“Community” is a big word to us. It represents the values that motivate our life work, David with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and me as a social-justice and environmental activist. As we surveyed the landscape of organizations, one stood out for me as an opportunity to see the whole of our area by looking through its scope: the West Marin Fund.
The fund’s executive director, Sarah Hobson, is a former colleague in philanthropy, so it was easy to pick up the phone and make a date with her to learn how the fund was serving the community. Seldom has one conversation opened so meaningful a world for me.
Because of a longtime connection with the Adirondack Community Foundation in upstate New York, the concept of place-based philanthropy was not new to me. But this place, West Marin, is unique in many ways; thus, an organization that exists to serve its whole must match the environs in its programmatic uniqueness. Over the past five years, my admiration for the patient, conscious and responsive nature of the fund has grown, as has my appreciation for its leaders—including Sarah, Harriet Moss and Gary Ireland—who guide the fund’s creative work of fostering equity in our towns.
Recently, Sarah enriched my sense of the potential of the West Marin Fund by introducing me to two of its anchor donors, Corey Goodman and Marcia Barinaga. Corey is a scientist, entrepreneur and former University of California, Berkeley, professor who works at the intersection of biotechnology and medicine. Marcia is a former science reporter who is now a wool maven. She is developing natural dyes for their ranch’s sheep’s wool, and recently showed me an exquisite peach-toned wool she had dyed, astonishingly, with avocado pits. I was convinced of the couple’s creativity before we even mentioned the word “philanthropy.”
My interest in understanding Marcia and Corey’s evolving view of philanthropy was borne of a lifetime of personal experience as a grant seeker, as the director of a private foundation, as an advisor to both donors and foundations, and as a lower-level giver. Most importantly, I know there are diverse ways to give. Some contribute time and experience, others share limited resources, and a few have sufficient capacity and willingness to go further.
Corey and Marcia fall into the latter category. Hearing the narrative of their own learning curve as donors was as illuminating to me as a slow-motion film of a flower coming to full blossom.
When we met, they explained that from the day they realized their income was exceeding their needs, they looked outward to identify organizations that were advancing a vision of a healthier and more equitable world. Their early contributions to a variety of groups were carefully tailored and overseen by themselves, and before moving to West Marin, they had experimented with running their own funding organization. Both approaches proved inefficient and ultimately unsatisfying to them.
When they first became involved with the West Marin Fund, they supported specific programs and used the giving mechanisms of the Donor Advised Fund. But as the years passed and they deepened their familiarity with the fund, they came to appreciate that one of its most powerful assets is the trust that the board has in both its staff and the nonprofits of the area. That trust, informed by years of experience, is reciprocated because the fund is seen as a force that listens to the community rather than acting preemptively.
Marcia and Corey came to realize that the mutual respect and professionalism of those relationships precluded their need to evaluate each individual gift they made, a task for which they lacked the time and expertise. The couple’s general contributions increased, providing the fund’s leaders with the freedom to decide how best to allocate the funds. They saw that their larger donations, combined with the long-range vision, values and strategic good sense of the staff, would allow the West Marin Fund’s equity-oriented work to have a far greater impact.
Larger gifts to the fund enable programs such as the Learning Hubs and Expanded Summer Programs for students in the Shoreline Unified School District, as well as the Early Childhood Equity initiative for all families with young children in West Marin—work that could not be sustained by annual smaller-grant giving alone.
Sustaining donors to the West Marin Fund enjoy a healthy peer status that fosters deep collaboration and inspires the confidence of both the donor and the organization. In general, when organizations have the confidence of their larger donors, they are liberated from the scarcity planning that invariably plagues groups that lack adequate, flexible funds among their assets. It is a painful and ubiquitous reality that often stems from a misapplication of caution on the part of donors. Yes, mindful sharing calls for awareness. But it also calls for a level of trust that many donors fail to summon.
When the intelligent commitment of both board members and staff have stood all manner of tests of time, a partnership is the most satisfying relationship a donor or grantee can have with a community foundation.
One of Corey and Marcia’s goals is to contribute to the fund’s active capacity building, strengthening the nonprofits in West Marin through convenings and direct support. They use powerful words to describe their feelings about the openness they have developed since they first worked with the West Marin Fund. They talk about “joy” in perceiving the benefits of their generosity: “It blows me away to see the value of the West Marin Fund,” said Corey, a man who strikes one as not being easily blown away. Marcia, who also sits on the fund’s board of directors, said that as the fund approaches its 10th anniversary, it is “able to imagine a critical mass of donors who will enable a West Marin Fund that is not only in or for the community, but is truly of the community.”
Visionary grantmaking enables visionary programming. We are a community rich in vision. Vision is realized by commitment and resources, human and financial. The West Marin Fund consistently expresses its gratitude to all those who share on behalf of West Marin’s present and future. David and I relish the prospect of working with those community builders who share Marcia and Corey’s sentiment that, “in the final analysis, the rewards of sharing are gifts to oneself.”
Before moving to Point Reyes Station, Harriet Barlow was the founding director of the Blue Mountain Center in Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y., and the director of the HKH Foundation.