Grant Areas

Adventures in Silo-Busting and Trust-Building

Since 2020, we’ve been taking deliberate steps at the Walter & Elise Haas Fund to re-examine our grantmaking purpose, reimagine our practices, and strengthen our commitment to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. We didn’t know where these steps would lead, but we knew we were building towards something transformative.  What has resulted is a re-articulation

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Aiming to be an Equitable Learning Organization

In this blog, we share the big picture of why the Walter & Elise Haas Fund aims to be an equitable learning organization, why learning matters to us, and how it drives our relationship with grantees. As we build our learning practice, we’ll share tactics and processes in future blogs. Justice, equity, and learning are

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We Need to Talk about Nonprofit
Job Quality More

   “When I was a nonprofit Executive Director in San Francisco in 2017 I made $80,000. Raising my salary wasn’t a priority for me; it would mean more fundraising and funds were better spent elsewhere. But that also meant I wasn’t prioritizing others’ salaries. Two brilliant staff, a BIPOC woman and gender-expansive folk who I

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Shifting Power to Young People:
Our Journey So Far

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Walter & Elise Haas Fund embarked on a learning journey to explore new pathways for supporting young people in the Bay Area to find the education and opportunities they deserve. Our fellow travelers in this work were representatives of a community that philanthropy too often ignores —

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Operationalizing
Trust-based Philanthropy:
A Learning Lab for the Field

Endeavor Fund as case study, part two Today, we’re continuing the case study of how the Walter & Elise Haas Fund established the Endeavor Fund as one way to operationalize trust-based philanthropy. Part one of this case study walked through the process of establishing the Endeavor Fund, from community-led insight as research, to screening and

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Operationalizing
Trust-based Philanthropy:
A Learning Lab for the Field

Endeavor Fund as case study, part one At the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, we’re making shifts in our practice and, at 71 years old, learning new things. This blog shares our recent process for establishing the Endeavor Fund, a new $24.5M, seven-year initiative aimed at closing the racial and gender wealth gap that we

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The Walter & Elise Haas Fund’s
New Grantmaking Philosophy

The impact of philanthropic endeavors is inextricably linked to the health of the nonprofits philanthropy supports. A failure to support organizations’ well-being – their resilience – ultimately hinders their ability to effectively serve the people and communities philanthropy aims to benefit. In recent years, the Walter & Elise Haas Fund strengthened our commitment to justice,

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