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Our staff from the Healthcare Foundation Northern Sonoma County joined NCG’s 2023 Power Building cohort to learn how to be better advocates for policy changes on behalf of our grantees and their clients. Our goals were to learn more about IRS rules governing public charity C3s doing C4 and C4-aligned funding, and to bring what we learn to our many nonprofit colleagues in Sonoma County who are hungry to engage in more advocacy, but unclear on how to move forward. There are roughly 3,000 nonprofits in Sonoma County. We believe that only by aligning and harnessing our collective resources around key issues that affect our most marginalized residents can we, as a sector, build the power necessary for real change.
If we have learned anything about effective community-based response to the health and economic consequences from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that coordination between governments, nonprofits, and faith-based organizations is critical to addressing the needs of people with the fewest resources who bear the greatest impact of the pandemic.
Climate change is here to stay. Although what’s needed seems endless as the impacts will worsen in the coming years, I am hopeful. Since joining the sector four years ago, I have seen an increasing number of funders exploring new ways to address climate change.
When NCG stepped into the policy space two years ago, we did so knowing that it would require us to be bold and lean deeply into our mission to bring philanthropy together to build healthy, thriving, and just communities. With the 2020 election around the corner, there is much at stake for California and our region. There has never been a more appropriate or important time for philanthropy to be advocating and using its voice in service of building a Better California for all.
California’s Central San Joaquin Valley is a vast region with 8 counties. It is home to rural, agricultural, poor and working-class communities of color and contains the majority of the state’s prisons. Despite its rich history of organizing and the undeniable impacts of the state’s investment in carceral infrastructure, the Central Valley is overlooked by philanthropy. This region receives the least amount of philanthropic resources for community organizing in the state.
Navigating the threat of wildfire is an ongoing reality of life in Sonoma County. From 2017 to 2020, fires burned more than 300,000 acres across the county, resulting in devastating losses to ecosystems, homes, communities, and human lives.