Foundation fundamentals: Communities pitch in to help fill funding gaps

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
—Henry David Thoreau

Andrea Sala reminisces fondly about the “good old days”—pre-Proposition 13—in California’s public schools.

“When I was in school, back in the ‘70s, I was on the track team,” says Sala, executive director of the Peninsula Education Foundation in Southern California’s Palos Verdes.

“Back then, my parents never wrote a check for a uniform or for me to take the bus to a track meet. There was no fundraising to speak of. My mom was in the PTA for issues like safety, giving children little extras, general well-being.

“But now,” Sala adds with a sigh, “my children are in high school, and I write a check for everything from their soccer uniforms to their bus passes and library books. Right now, we’re raising money for things like Kleenex for our classrooms!”

Local education foundations have been around for a long time, but their significance and impact on public schools have increased exponentially, and in close proportion to drastic cuts in state and federal funding, as well as the draconian effects on property tax revenues caused by the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.

LEFs that once supported extracurricular activities like field trips or music classes—both of which existed routinely in many California schools prior to 1978—are now raising funds for far more urgent purposes like saving teachers’ jobs or providing basic supplies and services. According to the California Consortium of Education Foundations, a statewide nonprofit that represents 600 California LEFs, these organizations raised more than $130 million in 2006 alone to benefit public schools. More than 35,000 community leaders throughout the state volunteer or serve on LEF boards, and many of these go on to become school board members as their involvement in education grows.

The ‘autonomous friend’

“Foundations are a way for local communities to address needs that haven’t been met,” says Susan Sweeney, executive director of CCEF. “We have had continual growth, driven by the economy, that consequently spikes from time to time,” Sweeney says. Sweeney adds that she’s seen a spike recently in efforts to aid county offices of education, driven by cuts in the public money available.

Founded in 1982 with just 20 foundations, CCEF’s membership has grown steadily over the years. Sweeney and her colleagues offer a variety of services and trainings that provide guidance to communities interested in establishing and maintaining an education foundation.

Most LEFs in California work with school districts, although some devote their energies exclusively to individual schools, according to Sweeney. Most support K–12 public education; a few focus on prekindergarten issues.

“We call local education foundations ‘an autonomous friend,’ ” Sweeney says, signifying that foundations are separate legal entities, usually set up as 501(c)(3) nonprofits, independent of school districts or county offices. Friends happily lend each other a helping hand, of course, and so LEFs typically collaborate with their allies in public education on their common goals.

School boards’ roles

Sweeney recalls being a school board member and then board president in the early 1980s, and beginning to see LEFs forming at that time, often as an offshoot of a local community fund.

“I’m approached by superintendents or school board members frequently to get these foundations going,” Sweeney says. “Then, often, LEF members later become [district or COE] board members” as a result of their immersion in local education issues.

“The board has an important role in communicating the district’s needs to the foundation,” Sweeney says. “We really recommend that both the school board and the superintendent have a liaison with the LEF. The voice of the school board member or superintendent carries a lot of weight,” she adds. “But I think its better [for the foundation’s autonomy] that they are nonvoting members.”

“Our board members have been very supportive,” says Maria Slavin, president of The Endowment for the Advancement of Children, an “independent, permanent endowment” (according to its Web site) that supports the San Luis Coastal Unified School District.

“They have to approve all the grants we make, of course,” Slavin continues. “They participate in our yearly telethon; they work on our phone bank and take pledges; they attend our fundraisers and other functions. Our superintendent has been at every telethon and has emceed for us. They have a completely ‘open-door’ policy with us, speaking at our events and asking how they can help.”

TEACh was founded about 11 years ago, according to Slavin. The idea was the brainchild of a school board member.

“In the ’90s budget crunch, we thought the timing was really right to start the foundation,” she says. “It was a really hard time for everyone.

“We wanted to be equitable in our policies for the foundation so that people felt there was trust in how we were handling their money. There was a lot of anger and sadness about what was happening then. And because of the way people were feeling, we wanted to make it clear that our foundation was completely separate from the school district. One of the ways we did this was through a newsletter that we still publish. We worked really hard with a P.R. person to cooperate with the school district to get the message out there.”

Possible pitfalls

As with any organization, things can go awry.

“It is a process, and sometimes it takes a while to get it right,” says Sweeney. “You really need to spend some time thinking through what you want to accomplish.” Starting out as an all-volunteer organization, often with more enthusiasm than expertise, LEFs can encumber their good intentions with a focus that is too narrow.

On Sweeney’s short list of other potential issues are the need to:

• build community support

• be as open and transparent as possible

• communicate with the school board, PTA and any other nonprofits that might be involved

“We talk a lot about the importance of having a [foundation] board that’s reflective of the whole community,” Sweeney says. “Some well-meaning individuals don’t reach out as broadly as they might. They need to institutionalize the foundation: reflect the whole community, get some space that is accessible, if they can. Sometimes they can get space from the school district, sometimes a storefront. It’s also helpful when all the materials are in one place.”

There are further possible obstacles on the way to establishing a successful LEF.

“You have to be careful about competing with other fundraising organizations within the district,” says Malcolm Sharp, a Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District school board member since 2005 and currently the president. He’d also spent six years as a board member of the Peninsula Education Foundation, including two as president.

“Coordination is an ongoing task. Say, for example, that in two weeks, there’s this big event,” Sharp continues. “There needs to be an agreement with other fundraisers, there has to be a window that there won’t be other fundraising activities taking place at the same time, a coordinated message [to the community] as to ‘why give to this foundation, this PTA, this booster club, that all have different needs.’ That message needs to be very clear.

“If you don’t have clear communications, then confusion will rule the day. And if you have competition with other fundraisers, then it’s a lose-lose all around. Some people see it as a zero-sum game. I have found that not to be true if you have a clear message. If you communicate up front and communicate well, then you run into less of a problem with this kind of competition.”

Issues of fairness

The growth of the LEF movement has some in the education community—and outside of it—concerned about issues of fairness. While it’s doubtful that anyone would question the desire of parents and communities to provide better educational resources for their children, not all parents and communities can provide the same level of assistance.

Sharp conveys mixed emotions about this point.

“Granted, a lower-income district doesn’t have the revenue sources that we have,” says the board president of a district in an upper-middle-class area of Southern California. “But they qualify for categorical programs that we don’t qualify for.

“You can’t talk about fairness and education and finance for California in the same breath,” he adds. “It’s not a fair system. You won’t find anybody who will say that the way we’re doing K–12 education is fair. It is what it is. And so you make the best of it.”

Early this year, a new undertaking with the goal of leveling the playing field of foundation support to schools was launched in Silicon Valley.

Two existing organizations, the San Jose Education Foundation and the Santa Clara County Education Foundation, merged in February to create the Silicon Valley Education Foundation. The SVEF aims to bring resources, creativity and innovative practices to pre-K through 12th-grade education throughout the diverse constituency it serves—an area that encompasses nearly three dozen districts, some 400 schools, approximately 9,000 teachers and more than 200,000 students.

Among its initiatives are a forum series and advisory groups in the areas of business, technology and education; a push to recruit and retain quality teachers; advising local businesses on how best to connect with local schools; advocacy for arts education and special education support; an emphasis on math education for middle school students; and advocacy on school readiness for preschool children.

“The Silicon Valley Education Foundation was established with the idea of creating one voice for education in the Santa Clara Valley,” says Muhammed Chaudry, president and CEO. “That can be a challenge when you have 34 school districts and COEs, some large, some small, some low income, some affluent.

“Obviously, Silicon Valley is known for a lot of innovation, but education hadn’t been a part of that. One of our primary goals is simply to raise awareness about education issues throughout the county.”

Although it is a young organization, SVEF has already developed core programs made possible by the $4.5 million budget that’s in place for the 2007–08 school year.

“About $500,000 of that goes to grant funding” for a variety of initiatives aimed at teachers, Chaudry says. “About $2 million goes to school readiness programs to support students and teachers in high-risk areas. About another $1 million goes to the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Program we’ve launched with a grant from the Knight Foundation.”

Chaudry acknowledges that many education foundations are established in affluent communities, begun with an influx of money from neighborhood parents.

“What we’re saying is that if we can leverage some of the corporations in this area, we can help children in more high-need neighborhood school districts where parents just don’t have the means to raise [similar funds],” Chaudry says.

To that end, he says, about a quarter of SVEF’s budget goes to health and human services for children from birth through age 5 and their families through the foundation’s School Readiness Program. The program partners with other area organizations to provide health, developmental and social services needed to enhance children’s opportunities to succeed academically and socially.

Why foundations matter

“The overarching issue is that foundations have become more of a necessity given the craziness of K–12 finance in California,” says Palos Verdes Peninsula USD board President Sharp.

“When I was growing up way back in the dark ages in New Jersey, you raised your property taxes. Even then, there was a need for booster clubs and the PTA. There’s always been the idea that we want to provide more than just what we get from the public revenue sources: better costumes for the school play, better uniforms for the band. The desire to have some kind of local funds that allow communities to put their own kind of signature on the schools is there, even when the funding situation is better than it is now. Having a foundation sort of stamps a community’s personality on a school district.”

Marsha Boutelle (mboutelle@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.