I love the Bay Area. I grew up
about a mile from here. I went
to really good schools, I had
loving parents, great siblings,
I had it really good. I do
remember when I was 12 or 13
years old and I was lying in bed
and I was upset, I was upset
that I wasn't doing more with my
life. Before you go thinking
that's strange, you have to know
that my dad is a rabbi, so the
guilt ran deep.
My parents instilled in me and
my siblings from the very
beginning, from an early age,
that I had to be part of giving
back and part of the community.
My first job out of college was
working on the Bill Bradley
Presidential campaign as a field
organizer. Although that didn't
go the way we wanted it to go, I
was forever changed. Be
part of something bigger that
yourself the Senator always said.
Off I went to New York, I worked
at the Robin Hood Foundation,
they were investing millions of
dollars of private money into
the public sector on behalf of
those living in poverty. I
wanted that for my hometown. It
was smart, effective,
philanthropy. I moved back, I
went to Berkeley for grad school
and we got started. In 2005, we
launched Tipping Point Community.
I wanted to create something new,
a hungry model that
addressed the urgency of the
problems that we faced right now.
That's exactly what we did.
Tipping Point exists to help the
one in five people here in this
region who are too poor to meet
their basic needs. We do that by
investing in the most promising
organizations working in
education, housing, family
wellness and employment. We
partner with them to get even
better, to increase their
capital and their organizational
capacity, strengthening their
organizations and their impact.
Our board covers every one of
your costs so that 100 percent
of our fundraising, which last
year was $22 million, goes out
the door the next year. We have
no endowment. Why are we here?
Today we're talking about taking
risks and taking shots, so from
the day one at Tipping Point we
always said we want to take risk
where we see opportunities. here
in the Bay Area, we see some of
the brightest minds come up with
never before seen solutions.
Thinking about travel, how do we
connect to each other, treating
disease, saving energy. All of
the stuff that we've been
talking about the last day and a
half here, there's no value put
on that in the non-profit sector.
The leaders that we work with at
Tipping Point simply are not
given the opportunity to think
big, to create or to invent. We
expect these non-profits to
tackle massive social problems,
and yet we give them no room to
do any of it. Last year, a
thousand of the world's largest
companies spent $680 billion on
research and development, which
is excellent. In our sector
about 0If companies like Apple
and Google and Levis can have
innovation labs, why can't we?
Three years ago, we started to
experiment, we built out an R&D
space and identified three gaps
in our portfolio, early
childhood education, affordable
childcare, and prisoner re-entry.
In year one, our education team
for that here in the Bay Area 80,
000 children are on the waitlist
to go to preschool. 80,000 here
in the Bay Area. They came up
with this idea of converting a
bus into a classroom. After
prototyping they rented a real
bus, tricked it out, and
partnered with one of our groups,
Aspire Public Schools, to
simulate the preschool
experience. Aspire told us they
had always wanted to offer
preschool, but they'd never
considered it like this. In
year two, our childcare team
launched GMA village, as in
grandmothers. A social
networking tool to connect
caregivers in West Oakland. In
year three our prisoner re-entry
team came up with a concept
called Common Ground. Common
Ground moves probation meeting
from jails and law enforcement
facilities to positive public
spaces like the Exploratorium or
even onto a ferry crisscrossing
the Bay. This year we decided to
fully integrate R&D into all of
our work, and we have spent
close to $5 million in R&D
projects over the past couple
years. This is unchartered
territory for our sector, so
we're having to write a new set
of rules. First, it's not enough
to just sprinkle some risk
capital and hope for the best.
We remain closely engaged and
connected with grantees and best-
in-class partners like IDO and
Google. Second, and we all know
this, this is so resource
intensive, and there's no
guarantee of outcomes. In your
sector, in the business sector,
you have to be comfortable with
failure. In our sector, that's
not always the case. We, as
funders, have to be willing to
take risk and be willing to fail.
It may sound like a cliché but
it's not for us. In the
pharmaceutical sector, a drug
can take 10 years to go from lab
to market, and only 10 percent
of those ever do. We have to be
willing to do that. We have to
shift our mindset as funders to
investing in known outcomes to
investing to learn. It's not
about the bus, it's not even
about adapting essential
business principles to fit our
sector, it's about the fact that
7 in 10 people born today
into poverty, will remain in
poverty their whole lives. It's
about giving brilliant leaders
in our sector the room to
innovate with intention and with
rigor. It's our job and our role
as individuals and funders and
people that care about our
community, to recognize that we
all have a role to play in
solving these massive social
problems. As the senator said
all the time, "We must be part
of something bigger than
ourselves." I hope you'll join
us at Tipping Point. Thank you.