Fund directors approve a new priority: Promoting Diversity and Inclusiveness. This work leads to a focus on immigrant rights and gay and lesbian equality.
Losing our visionary co-founder
Walter A. Haas, Jr., passes away on Sept. 20th. Fund President Ira Hirschfield remarks in his eulogy, “This is a man who never forgot, not even for a day, how blessed he was, and how difficult life is for so many.”
The Fund adopts four priorities for grantmaking: Children, Youth, Families and the Elderly; Strengthening Neighborhoods; Reducing Hunger and Homelessness; and Encouraging Volunteer Service and Philanthropy.
Grantmaking grows with experience
The Fund expands its grantmaking to support the elderly, youth, immigrants, equal opportunity, corporate social responsibility, and community initiatives such as hospitals.
The Haas, Jr. Fund is born
Walter A. Haas, Jr. and Evelyn D. Haas create a family foundation that serves under-resourced communities, educational institutions, and cultural organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The great grand-nephew of Levi Strauss, Walter A. Haas, Jr., helms Levi’s and continues the family tradition of moral leadership, integrating Levi’s sewing factories in the segregated South. Asked about his family’s penchant for giving, he says, “It’s in the genes.”
Three years ago, the Haas, Jr. Fund joined with CompassPoint Nonprofit Services to produce a study, UnderDeveloped, documenting the chronic fundraising challenges facing today’s nonprofits. One possible path to addressing these challenges, the report suggested, is for nonprofit leaders to foster and develop a “culture of philanthropy” in their organizations.
Even as we made this recommendation, we acknowledged that the term “culture of philanthropy” was not yet well understood across the sector. That’s why we recently asked Cynthia Gibson to look into exactly what the field means when we talk about such a culture. In Beyond Fundraising: What Does it Mean to Build a Culture of Philanthropy?, Cynthia synthesizes her conversations with diverse experts, offers a framework for understanding what a culture of philanthropy might look like, and provides suggestions on how to know if you have one.
The notion of a culture of philanthropy has generated a significant amount of conversation—and some controversy—across the field. Cynthia’s paper is a first attempt to try to capture what people are talking about and to identify the core elements of such a culture. The paper suggests that, without a deeper shift in how organizations hold the work of fund development, simply adopting new tools and techniques may not be enough.
The report is one of three studies that will be published by the Resetting Development work group, a panel of experts the Haas, Jr. Fund convened to identify and highlight promising practices that can help social change organizations break out of the chronic fundraising challenges spotlighted in the UnderDeveloped study.
Social justice leaders speak from the heart on the challenges and the rewards of fundraising — and offer clues from the inside about what it takes to do it right.
Sometimes it seems like everyone has something to say about fundraising. But it’s not often that we get to hear development directors and executive directors offer their most candid thoughts on the challenges and the deep rewards of raising the resources needed to drive social change. In this video, 11 leaders from organizations working on issues from LGBT equality to immigrant rights reflect on what it takes to raise money from individual donors, what inspires them about the work, what keeps them up at night, and more. It’s an intimate and inspiring portrait of an essential—if often maligned—part of the social sector’s work.
Through the voices of these leaders, we gain a truer understanding that fundraising is about much more than donor lists and direct marketing. It’s about engaging donors as partners in the work of social change, and ensuring that the responsibility for raising funds is shared throughout organizations and movements.
To learn more about the fundraising challenges facing the social sector, along with recommendations for change, see the UnderDeveloped report produced by CompassPoint and the Haas, Jr. Fund.
National network helps immigrants realize the life-changing benefits of citizenship.
For me, being a citizen is a huge comfort—I know that no one can take these opportunities away from me.
Giannina Diaz Coello
Until recently, Giannina was one of nearly 9 million U.S. immigrants who are eligible for citizenship. She arrived in the United States from Peru in 2007 after her mother, a U.S. citizen, petitioned for Giannina and her three children to come north.
Like so many others, Giannini was intimidated about applying for citizenship. But thanks to help and counseling from a local organization affiliated with the New Americans Campaign, she became a citizen in late 2016.
Co-founded by the Haas, Jr. Fund and other foundations, the New Americans Campaign is a wide-ranging partnership that works to help immigrants like Giannina navigate the path to citizenship. The focus of the nonpartisan campaign: connecting lawful permanent residents (LPRs) to trusted legal assistance and critical information that can simplify the naturalization process. The New Americans Campaign and its partners also work to promote the benefits of citizenship, which include: protection from deportation, eligibility for government jobs, freedom to travel, the right to vote, and much, much more.
Since 2011, the campaign has supported hundreds of thousands of immigrants to complete citizenship applications. It also has saved aspiring citizens and their families hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees. But with just 10 percent of people who are eligible for citizenship applying each year, the campaign recently has ramped up its outreach and other work—for example, by joining with other partners to launch an easy online service that guides immigrants safely through every step of their citizenship application.
“The New Americans Campaign aims to fundamentally transform the entire system of naturalization assistance through new levels of collaboration and innovation among the nonprofits, businesses and other institutions that assist legally qualified residents in becoming U.S. citizens,” said Eric Cohen, executive director of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a national nonprofit that serves as the campaign’s main coordinator. “The more our communities harness the civic and economic participation of new citizens, the stronger and more vital we will be as a nation.”
“The Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund is committed to finding ways to ensure that immigrants can contribute their full talents and voices to the cause of keeping our communities and our country moving forward,” said Cathy Cha, vice president of programs with the Haas, Jr. Fund. “It’s time to remove the barriers that keep so many immigrants from participating fully in the American experience.”
