Jon Clark, president of the James S. Bower Foundation, observes that “every system has a default switch. It’s sort of, ‘This is the way we do it.’” Successful organizations, he says, are able to shift how people think about a default and how they frame issues in their minds. 
Janet Garufis, president and CEO of Montecito Bank & Trust, believes local nonprofit organizations are undergoing a transformation as many long-time leaders move on or retire. “When that change happens, then there’s an opportunity for new thinking and new ways of doing things,” she says.
The roots of their passion for volunteering and bringing about change go back far for both Jon Clark, president of the James S. Bower Foundation, and Janet Garufis, president and CEO of Montecito Bank & Trust.
The two have been named the 74th Man and Woman of the Year by the Santa Barbara Foundation for their volunteer work and leadership positions at too many organizations to count.
They will be honored March 8 at a luncheon at the Four Seasons Biltmore, Coral Casino in Santa Barbara. The event is hosted by the Santa Barbara Foundation and sponsoring partners Noozhawk, Montecito Bank & Trust and Bryant & Sons Ltd.
“I would trace getting involved in nonprofits back to a kitchen,” Clark told Noozhawk.
Soon after graduating from UC Santa Barbara, he had an engaging conversation with a good friend and a UCSB professor that considered “what a kitchen could be.”
“I’ve never thought of a kitchen as anything other than what I’ve always experienced,” he said. “The fact that people even thought about things like that … it was kind of like, ‘Wow, things could be different?’”
He then met Paul Relis, the founding executive director of the Community Environmental Council, who scaled up the concept to society-wide systems.
“I was just hooked,” Clark said. “Just the fact that people thought that way, and the fact that they could make a difference about ‘communities not as we know them today’ was amazing.”
In addition to leading the philanthropic Bower Foundation, Clark has volunteered for and held leadership roles in organizations as diverse as the CEC, Cottage Health, Storyteller Children’s Center, the Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce and the Alliance for Living and Dying Well.
Sparked by his new perspective on how the world can — and could — work, Clark says his greatest interest lies in organizations that view social systems differently and are engaged in the process of changing them.
“Every system has a default switch,” he said. “It’s sort of, ‘This is the way we do it.’”
To unflip that switch, he explained, requires understanding with a “sympathetic viewpoint” how that default came to be, as well as recognizing “all the subtle systems in place that keep things the way they are.”
Change, he said, often comes down to shifting how people think about a default and how they frame issues in their minds.
As he gets older, he says, he agrees more and more with a former colleague’s maxim that it’s more important to ask the right questions than to get answers.
When he was on the board at the Santa Barbara Foundation, Clark questioned the underlying assumptions behind what he said has long “been a racial divide in (Santa Barbara) schools” between Latino and white students.
The mindset, he said, “has always been kind of, ‘We don’t look at that,’ or ‘That’s just because those families don’t value education.’”
“In the last five years, we’ve really changed the way we look at that to say, ‘Wow, that’s actually an issue in our schools — institutional racism in our schools,” he continued. “It really changed the way we as a community have looked at Latino students, how we serve them, and it’s been deep and fundamental and is still a process.”
While on the Santa Barbara Foundation board, Clark and his colleagues incorporated that new thinking by working with Just Communities’ Institute for Equity in Education to promote teachers’ cultural proficiency, and by bolstering the Santa Barbara Unified School District initiative, the Program for Effective Access to College.
Viewing his volunteering and work as facilitating positive change makes keeping such a loaded schedule not a chore but a familiar routine.
“To a certain degree, I don’t see the volunteerism as different from the rest of my life,” he said.
Garufis gave much of the credit for her ability to take on so many volunteering and leadership roles to her personal assistant, who keeps her to her tight schedule.
“I’m telling you, it takes a village,” she told Noozhawk. “I have extraordinary people in the bank who … are enthusiastic supporters of what I do in the community.”
On top of leading Montecito Bank & Trust, Garufis has volunteered for and held leadership roles in the Cancer Center of Santa Barbara with Sansum Clinic, the Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara, United Way of Santa Barbara County, the Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce and, most recently, the Music Academy of the West.
“I grew up in a family that was very committed to volunteerism,” she said. “We spent a lot of time doing things that were helpful to the community.”
That basis for getting involved was fostered by a focus on helping others at her Catholic school and, she said, “a penchant for problem solving.”
“When I see something that should be fixed, I want to go fix it,” she remarked.
Garufis’ interests in health care and education stem from family and personal history: Heart disease runs in her family, and she was a scholarship recipient in high school, which she said “changed my life.”
Over the last several years, she said, there’s been a change in board leadership in local nonprofit organizations as many long-time leaders move on or retire.
“There’s this whole new influx of new board members, and when that change happens, then there’s an opportunity for new thinking and new ways of doing things,” she said. “And being someone who loves change, I wanted to be part of that.”
Her recent volunteering includes co-chairing CALM’s capital campaign, raising money for rebuilding the children’s library at the Santa Barbara Central Library, joining the Goleta Valley Chamber of Commerce board, chairing Sansum Clinic’s Board of Ttrustees and volunteering with banker education at Western Independent Bankers.
Garufis said she’s learned that with limited free time, she can maximize her impact by focusing her help on efforts that are most in line with her experience.
“When a group or organization approaches me and says, ‘We really want you to be on our board,’ usually my answer is, ‘What is it you really want to accomplish?’” she said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.