Where tech, politics & giving meet: CEO Nicole Taylor considers Silicon Valley’s busy intersection

Nicole Taylor brings an insider’s view on philanthropic trends from her position as president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The community foundation’s donors, based in Mountain View, California, spent nearly $4.6 billion in 2023, a significant increase from the $2.6 billion awarded the year before.

That spike, Taylor said, was due to some major donors “who really spent a lot of money on some of the things they cared about.”

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

The foundation does not comment on specific donors or donations, but reported grants show that its clients include some of the richest and most powerful people in Silicon Valley. That includes Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, other Facebook alumni and those whose wealth comes from the booming business of artificial intelligence.

Taylor, 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 racial justice advocacy and the growth of donor-advised funds. The interview has been shortened.

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A: Donor-advised funds have made it possible for a lot of people to get into the game, as I like to say. Get off the sidelines and get into the game and make a real impact in ways that were previously inaccessible to them. You don’t have to be rich. You don’t have to set up your own private foundation, and it gives you the opportunity to gather some resources and pull them out or take them out right away.

We don’t really have to do much to encourage our donors to distribute it. … We’ve set up issue area 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, a journalism fund. …And then we have an inactive fund policy. If you no longer provide a subsidy after two years, we will actually put it into our community fund.

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A: That’s bizarre because the questions are supposed to be about the private foundations. And I tell this to my private foundation colleagues all the time. I’m like, ‘You’re all sitting on your assets.’ We don’t sit on our assets. They get out. … There’s a billion dollars in the private foundation, and they only have to spend a fraction of that every year. I’m going to harp on this because that’s where the fear should be. Why do they get away with that? And people are concerned about a $25,000 DAF, which gives out $5,000 in subsidies every year. Because that is the size of the DAFs we are talking about. And if you want to talk about the largest we’ve had, they’re the most active of all our donors, and they’re the ones who commit significant resources every year. Hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

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A: There is great concern about this, even though the decisions were very limited and concerned admission to higher education. The fear and some of the lawsuits that have already been filed are real, palpable. People are worried. … This is not the time to retreat. This is not the time to walk away from communities of color and communities that have faced systemic inequality for decades, for hundreds of years. What we started to do is figure out how to prepare organizations to know what they can do, know what they can say, where inviting legal attacks can happen and what kind of legal education they need and how to to prepare? So we’ve actually launched a fund through the California Black Freedom Fund, which we’re incubating. It’s a legal education and advocacy fund, so LEAD, and it focuses specifically on racial justice issues and organizations working in that area. There are funding resources, legal experts coming to the table and advocacy experts, and they’re training nonprofit leaders in the state of California on this.

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A: Silicon Valley, we like to joke that we are the cash machine for both political parties. There is a lot of activity in our region right now with the elections. And it’s not just the presidential election. There are congressional races, there are local races. There are so many people who are very active in the election season and they are very interested in the citizen participation part of it.

As for donor events, we’re going to have a few in June. One about social involvement and one about the role of local journalism and democracy and where people get their information from. And if English is not your native language, where do you get information about voting, about registering, about how to get involved and involved? And again, not just at the national level. You can vote on who is elected to your child’s school board.

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A: We’re at this very interesting intersection here in the Valley. Our donors are acutely aware of the impact of technology on information and community engagement, both positive and negative. They are very aware of it and want to make sure they can help promote the positive, in terms of community engagement and combating misinformation.

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The Associated Press’s coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits is supported by the AP’s partnership with The Conversation US, with funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.