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Press
Press About the Funnel Foundation
Nonprofit Group Helps Raise Funds for Other Nonprofits
SF Independent, August 14th, 2001
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Small nonprofit groups throughout the city may have a better chance of survival with some extra help: the Funnel Foundation, a nonprofit organization created to provide grants to small nonprofit groups.
According to Tracy Stampfli, the executive director of Funnel, the foundation was created last year by a group of community activists to support the financial needs of nonprofits in the Bay Area that provide innovative services or less mainstream services on a small budget. Stampfli has worked with various nonprofit groups in the Bay Area, including Hands on San Francisco and Open Hand. "The organization was started because most of the people involved in the group knew lots of good nonprofits that couldn't continue to exist due to rising operating costs, including rising rents," Stampfli said.
The organization has collected approximately $100,000 - mostly from individual donations - tor provide some grants for this year and to meet operating costs. The groups operating costs are only $2,000 annually, because there is no official office space, Stampfli said. The foundation maintains a web site, www.funnel.org, and a mailbox. "This year we're hoping to make five or six grants of $10,000 each," Stampfli said. Some of the leftover funds would be applied to grants next year, she said.
Funnel board member Saskia Triall [sic] said the organization is taking advantage of the influx of technological companies and workers that entered the Bay Area within the last four years or so. Some people came to the Bay Area just to make money in the computer industry, but some workers, new to the area, are civic minded and want to make a difference in their neighborhood, Triall said. They just don't know how to help their community while working 60 to 70 hours a week, she said. And that is where the Funnel Foundation comes in, according to Triall. The group would help workers in the tech or computer field participate in their community by using their donated dollars to help provide grants to local nonprofits that Funnel has researched or examined, reducing the leg work for busy people in the computer field, Triall said. "There's a lot of folks who are newe to the Bay Area and who want to be tied into the area making a significant amount of money in the computer industry," Sasha Magee, a Funnel Board member, said. Funnel allows them to put their money to good use, Magee said. According to Triall, some Funnel members "have ties to the tech field" which helps in the fund-raising effort.
The first round of the grant application process began this summer. The deadline is September 1. Selected applicants for the grants will be announced in October 2001, Stampfli said. Applicants must meet one of the objectives described by Funnel to apply for a grant. Some objectives include providing decent affordable housing, promoting culturally specific approaches to health care that reduce cultural and ethnic disparities, increasing access to higher education and vocational opportunities, and improving the academic performance of disadvantaged children through tutoring, mentoring, parent involvement, and special programs. A full list of objectives and application instructions are available through the Funnel Web site.
Nonprofit groups that have already submitted their requests for grants include the Center for Young Women's Development on Fillmore Street which provides services such as job training, for young women on the streets or in the juvenile justice system, and St. Peter's Housing Committee on Valencia Street which helps inform community members about tenant rights in English and Spanish.Funnel would pay attention to many innovative organizations, such as Mission Agenda - which performs fire prevention outreach to residential hotels and provides tenants rights counseling - that may be ignored by other grant-giving organizations, Magee said.
While there are other larger scale organizations like the the San Francisco Foundation, which provides grants to various nonprofits, Funnel is the only organization of its size in the city that provides grants to small nonprofits, Stampfli said.