But winning a $500,000 Google Impact grant last year transformed the Oakland nonprofit, helping it land several other six-figure donations that swelled its budget to $1.3 million. This year it will serve 365 Bay Area young people and has attracted national attention from those looking to diversify the tech industry.
“It’s been revolutionary for Hack the Hood,” Chief Operating Officer Mary Fuller said of winning the grant. “Most of the time in the nonprofit world, all you do is think about the next day. Knowing we had this level of investment in the community allowed us to do so much, to think big.”
On Tuesday, Google.org, the Mountain View tech titan’s philanthropic arm, will begin accepting applications to find the next Hack the Hood in this year’s competition. Google.org will award $5 million to 25 Bay Area nonprofits. The deadline is July 23, and the application can be found at http://bit.ly/1GDlwj1.
Google.org has conducted similar Impact challenges in the United Kingdom, India, Australia, Brazil, Japan and France, but none drew as many applicants as the 1,000 that that came from the nonprofit-laden Bay Area last year.
A panel of advisers — which includes former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Warriors forward Harrison Barnes, Giants outfielder Hunter Pence and Chronicle Editor in Chief Audrey Cooper — will help winnow the field. Then the public will decide the winners through online voting. The top four vote-getters will receive $500,000 each. Six finalists will receive $250,000 each and 15 runners-up will receive $100,000 apiece.
The goal of the competition, said Google.org director Jacquelline Fuller is to “surface groups that don’t make the cocktail circuit. Where the founder doesn’t travel in the same circles as the funders.”
Traditional foundations and individual donors tend to give to established nonprofits because they want assurance their money will garner some immediate results, even if they are only incremental.
Google.org donates to some traditional nonprofits, too. But the Impact challenge program rewards organizations that take risks on ideas that could have big ramifications — even if the organization is fledgling or the idea might be a little out there.
“Because we’re Google, we understand technology risk, innovation risk,” Fuller said. “What we’re not looking for is sort of a baby-step incremental thing. We want to know, ‘What are the crazy ideas?’
“One thing we heard from our winners from last year was ‘The single best thing you did for us is that you were willing to take a risk on us,’” Fuller said.
One of last year’s $100,000 grant winners was Lava Mae, which provides mobile showers for homeless people in San Francisco. The nonprofit received its funding right before it launched.
“It was a huge affirmation for us, a huge leap of faith for us,” said Leah Filler, Lava Mae’s global community engagement director.
Receiving the grant gave the organization leeway to focus on fundraising. Since landing the grant, the organization has doubled its staff, and it is retrofitting three more buses so it can to offer 50,000 showers annually.
Hack the Hood enjoyed similar benefits after winning the Google imprimatur, receiving large donations from Infosys, Kaiser Permanente, the California Wellness Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation and others. It also raised the company’s profile in the tech world and beyond.
“We got visibility that was global,” Hack the Hood’s Fuller said. “And we were able to leverage that.”
Filler, an activist for low-income San Francisco residents, hopes the good feelings from the Impact program help thaw some of the tensions that the tech-boom-inspired gentrification has created in San Francisco.
“Yes, the city is changing. Yes, there’s a big tech presence here,” she said. “But this narrative about pitting these two sectors against each other, who are opposing each other all the time, isn’t accurate. There are opportunity to work together like this.”
©2015 the San Francisco Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
