Overview
The Community Foundation Santa Cruz County was founded in 1982 in response to a natural disaster: a storm that dropped 25 inches of rain and caused extensive flooding and mudslides. Citizens of the region were looking for ways to support recovery efforts over the long term, and the Foundation was established to meet this need. Since its inception, the Foundation has distributed $223M in grants serving over 800 nonprofit organizations.
When Susan True joined the Foundation as Chief Executive Officer in 2017, however, she perceived that there was still a long way to go in terms of how the organization addressed racial equity. “While we had made some progress, there was a gap between how we perceived our I equity journey and how leaders of color in the community felt,” True said. “We began looking at our grantmaking portfolio to see what kinds of organizations were missing and we noticed that there was a lot more we could do to help lift up the voices, culture, and power of people of color.”
Racial equity has become an explicit and central priority under True’s leadership, both in terms of the Foundation’s community-facing work and its internal operations. The Foundation has also established a racial equity tracker to measure its progress against goals and to hold itself accountable to commitments.