Our Approach
How we decide what to fund.
SVCED is a small foundation with a specific point of view. This page explains the theory of change, the principles, and the process behind every grant we make.
Theory of change
Opportunity is built, not distributed.
Silicon Valley's economy generates more capital per capita than almost any region on earth — and produces some of the country's widest disparities in who gets to participate in it. Closing that gap is not primarily a messaging problem. It is a capital, capacity, and infrastructure problem.
SVCED exists to route philanthropic capital into the three things the region reliably under-funds: pathways for young people and adult learners, technical assistance for the small firms that already exist here, and community grantmaking to the neighborhood organizations doing the daily work.
We don't run direct services at scale. We fund the operators who do — and we hold ourselves accountable to whether their programs produce measurable outcomes for the people they serve.
Grantmaking principles
Four commitments we make to every partner.
Fund the operator, not the org chart
Small, trusted, community-rooted teams outperform larger institutions on the metrics we care about. We look for the person doing the work — and we back them, often before their peers do.
Multi-year, unrestricted where we can
Restricted one-year grants force partners to reinvent themselves annually. When our diligence supports it, we default to two- and three-year general operating support.
Report against what we said we'd do
Every program has a public logic model and a small number of indicators. When we miss a target, we say so in the annual report and explain what we're changing.
Keep the money moving
We are a working foundation, not an endowment. Dollars raised in a fiscal year are deployed against outcomes in that year or the next — not compounded indefinitely.
Process
The path from listening to publishing.
- Step 01Listen
We start with the field — practitioners, employers, and residents — before we start with a strategy. Program areas emerge from what we hear, not what we assume.
- Step 02Design with
Programs are co-designed with the community anchors who will run them. We supply capital, back-office, and evaluation; they supply the trust and the local knowledge.
- Step 03Deploy
Grants and contracts move on a published calendar with clear criteria. Our default is smaller checks to more operators, tracked against a small number of outcomes.
- Step 04Verify
Participant-level outcomes are verified by partner employers, community colleges, and anchor organizations — not self-reported. Independent fiscal review annually.
- Step 05Publish
Mid-year updates and a full annual report. Grants awarded, dollars deployed, and outcomes achieved are posted publicly on the Grants and Impact pages.