December 2023

Progress Newsletter

By James Higa, Executive Director of PVF; and Savannah Lira, Program Officer

Bill Somerville, the founder and first president of Philanthropic Ventures Foundation (PVF), will retire on December 31st. 

Through over 60 years in nonprofit work, Bill has singlehandedly transformed what philanthropy could be. He brought ad(venture) back into philanthropy. He approached making a difference in our communities in a wholly different way. He believed in people most of all.

Find ‘em and fund ‘em. Take a risk on emerging leaders within our communities with high potential and passionate ideas. Provide high trust grants to these people through paperless giving. Drive the grant cycle down to an unheard of 48 hour average of immediate response, and get out of their way.

In honor of his legacy, we take this time to look back at a few of his many accomplishments as a maverick grantmaker and philanthropic leader.

In 1991, Bill founded Philanthropic Ventures Foundation with seven generous donors and a small staff to test new approaches to creative grantmaking and to maximize the impact of the philanthropic dollar. Under his stewardship, PVF has distinguished itself as a leader in “venture philanthropy,” a term coined by Bill to describe PVF’s quick-response, high-impact grant model - including immediate response grants and paperless giving.

In 2001, Bill proposed the idea to place graduating Stanford students at a foundation for a year-long fellowship and supporting them with a stipend. Now 23 years later, the Tom Ford Fellowship Program is still going strong at the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford and over 60 students have participated in the unique effort to bring more young people into philanthropy.

Top Row: 2022-2023 Fellows, Bottom Row: 2023-2024 Fellows

In 2004, Bill created the Parent Involvement Worker Program, placing recent English as a Second Language (ESL) graduates as bilingual workers in the classroom to ease the language barrier and improve communications between teachers and parents in East Palo Alto and encourage other Spanish-speaking parents to get more involved in their child's education.

Bill Somerville with Nancy Alvarez and Imelda Jovel – former parent involvement workers at Cesar Chavez Academy

In 2008, Somerville authored Grassroots Philanthropy: Field Notes of a Maverick Grantmaker with Fred Setterberg. In a Financial Times review of the book, Sean Stannard-Stockton (President and Chief Investment Officer of Ensemble Capital) wrote “With no agenda other than his need to set things right in the world, Somerville lays out a series of principles that can be adopted by both endowed national foundations and those with lesser means, providing they have an urge to use their wealth to improve the world. In Somerville, I found a risk-taking, venture philanthropist fused with a roll-up-his-sleeves social worker. The mixture is a philanthropic force of nature.”

Bill has continuously shared his knowledge and approach to philanthropy, consulting with over 400 community and family foundations in his career and advising on philanthropy curriculum at several universities, including teaching philanthropy at Stanford University and developing and teaching the country’s first community college level philanthropy course at Oakland’s Laney Community College.

In 2016, he gave a TED Talk at Brigham Young University where he spoke about how the simple can be significant when it comes to philanthropy, touching on our immediate response grant programs and fast funding for grassroots organizations that have a big impact on the community.

32 years later, PVF has grown to over $20M in annual grant making. And we still embrace with a spirit of radical collaboration these core principals that Bill put into motion all those years ago. Today, we honor, celebrate, and give thanks to this towering figure in our lives who has touched so many of us and made our communities a materially better place for those with the greatest of needs.

Bill has been the ever shining light upon the hill that guided and pointed the way. Bill, your light burns bright and we will follow that path to do good with the vigor, energy, and inspiration you showered upon us every single day.