Best example of San Francisco family values: Gay marriage For one month in 2004 San Francisco's City Hall hosted one of the biggest parties in the city’s history. More than 4,000 same sex couples, some arriving from all over the world, were issued marriage licenses in defiance of state law. An appellate court shut down the party while legal debates were waged on equal protection under the Constitution and the even more bewildering question: What exactly is "marriage" anyway? The state Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision to invalidate the licenses without answering the marriage question.

Money isn't everything—at least, not to those in the business of venture philanthropy, an offspring of centuries-old socially responsible investing that Jerome Dodson modernized in San Francisco in 1984.

In 1999, John (Bud) Colligan, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel Partners, working with long-time business executive Penelope Douglas, created a venture fund—now called Pacific Community Ventures—to bring capital and management expertise to modest-size companies that pay decent wages and benefits to people in depressed neighborhoods. Colligan was among the first wave of people who changed the definition of social philanthropy by bringing capitalism into the equation. Along with giving money, these executives wanted to give their time, their expertise, and their connections. They aimed to do good by teaching the disenfranchised how to make a better living. In return for doing good, they expected a return on their investments, or at least a sustainable enterprise.

Around the same time, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar began investing in operations with a "double bottom line"—a social agenda and enough profits to become self-supporting. Jeff Skoll, eBay's first employee, set up a foundation in 1999 to foster "innovations that will benefit humanity," with more than $90 million committed to social entrepreneurs so far.

Rewarding waste management: Ciudad Saludable, a non profit that trains municipal workers throughout Peru to redcue waste in landfills and generate income through recycling, is receiving $615,000 over the next three years from the Skoll Foundation.
Courtesy of Ciudad Saludable

What all these efforts share is a belief that donors and grantees are exchanging far more than just cash. "We believe we can help close the gap between rich and poor in California by creating good jobs and increased stability for the state's working poor," says Douglas.

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