Our Donors’ Generosity Leads to Opportunity and Impact

Our Mission, Vision, and Values drive our actions

Our Mission

To bring together people, ideas, and resources to inspire philanthropy and accomplish great things

Our Vision

To make Santa Cruz County thrive for all who call it home, now and in the future

Our Values

Accelerating Solutions. Building Trust. Advancing Opportunities.

Our Grantmaking Overview

Our annual community grants process to strengthen our ability to be a bridge between donors’ goals and your work to address our County’s needs. We seek to be advocates for your work with our donors who direct more than 80% of the grants we award to the causes they care about most.

While our 2021 community grant process and timeline are being finalized this February, we invite nonprofits to submit a one-page profile of their work anytime. These 1 Page Funding Requests are intended to connect you with donors in new and more meaningful ways throughout the year. It will seek to answer the questions donors ask us most often. Download a worksheet below to help populate the template that's also shared below.

We accept these requests on a rolling basis for donor-advisor consideration. Information about our 2021 community grants process will be available in February. You can view our 2020 partner grant recipients here.

To download the documents below, some browsers will require you to right click on the document and select 'open in new window'.

Eligibility & Criteria for Selection

We partner with 501(c)(3) organizations and/or fiscally-sponsored groups to advance our goals and priorities. In addition to alignment with our priority funding areas, we use a variety of criteria in which to evaluate proposals including your organization’s strength of leadership, its ability to attract resources to fuel your mission work, and your record of success towards clearly defined outcomes that respond to local social conditions and challenges.

Information about 2021 grantmaking opportunities will be available in February.

Education Initiatives

We have two initiatives underway to prepare children and youth for college and career pathways.

Girls Paving the Way is a three-year program supporting the educational progress and social-emotional learning of a cohort of girls from sixth through eighth grade in Pajaro Valley. This initiative is led by the Educational Partnership Center at UCSC and supported by a variety of youth-serving organizations and funded through our Fund for Women and Girls.

Closing the Math Achievement Gap is a multi-year initiative with Santa Cruz County College Commitment to improve student math scores by supporting math skill acquisition. It is funded primarily through our Borina Fund for Education.

Looking for information on our scholarships? Learn more here.