Sylvia Yee 
Vice President of Programs
Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund
Interview By Pat Taylor

Sylvia Yee is Vice President of Programs at the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund. She serves on numerous national and local boards, including the Family Resource Coalition of America and Asian Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy. She was also a founding board member of Grantmakers for Children, Youth, and Families.  This interview took place on July 13, 1999.

Pat Taylor: Please tell us about yourself and how you got involved in grantmaking.

Sylvia Yee: For many years I worked in education – in the public schools and at the university level.  I also ran a community-based nonprofit working with kids in San Francisco’s Mission District. I first got started in philanthropy 11 years ago, when I was hired by the San Francisco Foundation to head their education program. And then 6 years ago, I came to the Haas, Jr. Fund to head their Children, Youth, and Families program area. But my interests aren’t limited to education and youth issues. I have a real passion for community development as well, and served as the chair of a community development corporation for many years. My current position, as Vice President at the Fund, gives me the wonderful opportunity to think and work broadly across program areas and look for the areas of synergy and intersection.

PT: Tell us about the strategic planning process that the Haas, Jr. Fund has just completed. Are there lessons for others?

SY: One of the most important parts of the process – and one of the first things we did –  was to reflect on the values of the Fund. We spent a lot of time with the staff and board on this. We asked ourselves what values this Fund stands for, and which are the most important. Later in the process, as we started to think programmatically, our values statement helped inspire and guide our thinking about what the future work of the Fund should be. It was the touchstone for our planning.

Another important part of the planning process was reviewing what we had heard from the Trustees over the years – what issues interested them, how they thought about these issues. We listened carefully to what they said. Then the staff delved deeply in each program area to identify and understand issues and trends in the community and opportunities for strategic leadership and new developments. The strategic plan synthesized these strands.

Because we’re a family foundation, the planning process was much more personal than at other kinds of foundations. As staff, we were very interested and concerned about making sure the family was personally invested in the Fund’s future course.  We wanted to really understand where the Trustees’ personal passions and interests were and find the intersections between them and the pressing community needs.

This required a lot of informal, one-on-one conversations, as well as more formal work meetings with the Trustees. For me, as a staff member, it was a wonderful clarifying, iterative process. I came out of it with a very good sense of what this foundation will be like going forward. The board made it clear that they wanted the Fund to be more activist, more roll-up-your sleeves, more hands-on. They also wanted more focus in our work.  I’m sure other foundations hear this from their Trustees as well – we can’t do everything, so we have to choose carefully where we can make a real difference.

The challenge was to come up with a set of ideas that both board and staff would feel energized and passionate about. When we first started I don’t think we realized how long the planning process would take or how important the time we spent on it would be.  But I really can’t emphasize how meaningful it was for us – it has given us the clarity to move forward in new directions, to renew our commitments to some of our existing program areas, and to make the difficult decision to wind down some of our old work.  As we make grants and begin the actual on-the-ground work, we will continue to check in with the Trustees, to make sure we are still on course. 

PT: What came out of your strategic plan programmatically?

SY: The board endorsed continuing our grantmaking in Strengthening Children, Youth, and Families. A big commitment in this area is the Beacons Initiative, which transforms school sites into community centers for kids and families during the non-school hours. We will continue working with the Mayor’s Office and the school district to develop and institutionalize this public-private partnership. We are exploring some new work around youth leadership development as well. Finally, we will launch a new youth sports initiative sometime next year in collaboration with the San Francisco Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 

In our Strengthening Neighborhoods program, we plan to focus our resources and work more intensively in selected low-income neighborhoods. We will take a developmental, long view of our work there. At the same time, we’ll continue to help build the capacity of “anchor institutions” – those organizations that have the networks, know-how, and capacity to catalyze neighborhood change. We’ll also continue our interest in grassroots leadership development and community organizing. We want to raise the voices of people in the community to help solve the problems that affect them. This is an example of how the Fund’s overarching values intersect with all our program areas – there is a very heavy emphasis placed on grassroots, resident-driven efforts.

A new program area that came out of the strategic plan is Promoting Diversity and Inclusiveness. Here, we will focus on issues around race, gender and sexual orientation.  We want to nurture leadership in these communities, whether they’re ethnic communities or communities of interest. We also want to create opportunities for connections across these communities. Our interest in diversity and inclusiveness will also infuse our work in the Neighborhoods as well as the Children, Youth and Families area. 

Our new program to Enhance Nonprofit Leadership and Institutions reflects the  Trustees’ understanding of the importance of investing in the leaders and organizations who are our partners in the field. We know that the kinds of things that we want to accomplish and the success of grantees’ work depends so much on the leadership of those organizations.  So we want to promote leadership development at the executive and the board levels among our grantees. Our interest in leadership spans from grassroots start-ups, to established community organizations, to the major civic institutions that this Fund supports.  

Both these new program areas – Diversity and Inclusiveness, and Enhancing Nonprofit Leadership – will not only make targeted grants, but will also work in synergy with the Fund’s other program areas.

PT: As a local funder, you have more opportunity to get involved with your grantees. Can you tell us a little about the level of your involvement with them? 

SY: Yes, I agree that local funders have a distinct advantage in how involved we can be in the community. We are able to convene grantees more easily. For example, the Fund just brought together some grantees to discuss youth leadership development.  We’d like to do more of this kind of convening in the future.

I think the particular advantage local funders have is the ability to play an ongoing role at the table around community issues. For example, in our Beacons Initiative, as members of the steering committee, the Fund provides institutional continuity and “glue” to this public/private collaboration. During the past five years of this initiative, there’s been a change in mayors, a change in city supervisors, changes in the department heads, and turnover in mid-level staff within the city and the school district. 

Local funders can be the source of long-term attention to issues and to initiatives like this. We can help create the kind of local partnerships and relationships that make things happen. The tension for grantmakers is that this is much more staff- and labor-intensive than responsive grantmaking.  It’s something that we’re struggling with – how to make the space and time to play this kind of more activist role.

PT: In your funding you look at both people and place.  In September, NFG will hold a joint conference with Grantmakers for Children, Youth, & Families. Where do you see the issues of people and place intersecting?

SY: I think they overlap almost everywhere. In fact, it’s sometimes hard to disentangle them. Whether it is employment or diversity or youth development, it seems like there’s a component of both people and place in many of the more innovative and effective programs and strategies. For example, in our family support program, we fund place-based strategies in the form of family resource centers – what used to be called “settlement houses” in the old days. In the youth sports work we’re planning, there will also be a very important neighborhood-based aspect. We plan to select 10 inner-city neighborhoods and see how sports can be a way of bringing community members and resources together around kids. Those are a couple examples of how we’re combining individual or people outcomes with strategies that are neighborhood-based.

At the same time, in our community development work, I’ve noticed more and more CDCs looking at youth programming, elderly work, and even taking on welfare reform. The lines are increasingly blurred between the organizations that we might have historically considered people-based as opposed to place-based. 

PT: How do you coordinate your grantmaking practices to combine people and place? Are some grantees funded out of each program area at the same time?

SY: Actually, many of the grantees that we work with have a broad vision for what they want to accomplish and are approaching issues more comprehensively. As a result, an increasing number of requests could potentially fit under more than one program area. For example, one grantee, the San Francisco Organizing Project, is seeking to accomplish both neighborhood improvement and youth development kinds of outcomes. Another example is Asian Neighborhood Design (AND). Its work is funded under our Strengthening Neighborhoods program but it could easily qualify under our family support area as well because of its focus on long-term outcomes for families. What’s so interesting about AND is that it’s working at the intersection of several fields. Their work around employment retention and family self-sufficiency has much to offer to the field of family support.

So, sometimes it’s really a judgement call. In these cases, we look at where the outcomes cluster and then make a choice of which program officer will take the lead in looking at the particular request. Staff often consult across program areas, and program officers from more than one area sometimes make site visits together.

As we move forward, I think we’ll need even closer coordination between program areas at the Fund. It is possible that we might fund a grantee from different program areas.

PT: Programmatically, the Fund seems to look at adults primarily in the context of the family, as parents and providers.  How does this fit with the Fund’s interest in neighborhood revitalization efforts?”

SY: Well, programmatically, the Fund doesn’t look so much at adults as individuals but rather as members of families and communities. We place a strong value on the engagement of people in their own communities, and this plays out in our grantmaking around mobilizing and organizing communities at the grassroots level within our Neighborhoods program area.

At the same time, some of the family resource centers we fund within Children, Youth and Families are helping to broaden the visions of the parents they work with – encouraging and supporting them in taking a more active and assertive role in their communities. For example, one family resource center we fund helped organize adults and kids around neighborhood safety issues. The adults were concerned because the kids didn’t have a decent place to play after school. So the family resource center played a key role in making sure that the public park near the center was safe. I think that, for many people, this type of small step can represent the beginning of greater civic engagement in their communities.

PT: Is there anything you’d like to add?

SY: We consider the Fund to be very much a work in progress. We’re really very excited by the work ahead of us and know that we have lots to learn in getting there. We look very appreciatively at the work that, for example, the Hewlett and Annie E. Casey Foundations have done in their initiatives and hope to continue learning from other organizations that are grappling with these same challenges as we go forward.

Contact: Sylvia Yee, Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund; One Lombard St., Suite 305; San Francisco, CA 94111; 415-398-3744

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