Ron Gallo on Thursday announced the Santa Barbara Foundation’s new strategic priorities, a revised mission reached after 18 months of soul-searching and meeting with local stakeholders for input.
Going forward, the organization plans to focus its assets and engagements on support for vulnerable populations and working families, “the forgotten backbone” of the community, said Gallo, president and CEO of the foundation.
“We are still going to be the Santa Barbara Foundation, a full-service community foundation, doing what we need to be doing,” Gallo said.
Some subject areas the foundation will focus on include: improving the delivery of quality health care; addressing food insecurity; building capacity for mental-health services; strengthening homelessness programs and resources; increasing affordable and accessible quality child-care opportunities; building job skills through effective workforce development; and creating more workforce housing for a growing region.
There will be four grant cycles in 2019 dedicated to issues for vulnerable populations, people without health insurance, without shelter, who are food insecure, and have mental-health issues, Gallo said.
“Over the next five years, our strategic priorities include a reinvigorated commitment to supporting our most vulnerable populations throughout Santa Barbara County by addressing basic human needs,” the foundation wrote in document distributed at Thursday’s event at the Santa Barbara Zoo.
“We will invest in components of broader systems change by supporting those individuals and families that are living paycheck to paycheck and are susceptible to becoming our most vulnerable residents with just one life event – an illness, car accident, change in relationship or employment.”
The Santa Barbara Foundation also plans to increase the emphasis on building philanthropic capital in the region, and continue to support the nonprofit sector.
The new mission statement, Gallo said, is “to mobilize collective wisdom and philanthropic capital to build empathetic, inclusive and resilient communities.”
Foundation board member Michael Young said, “Communities need us to show up differently than we’ve done in the past.”
The strategic plan “deep dive” included a lot of outreach to the nonprofit community and other stakeholders, he said.
“Not only did we listen but we heard you,” he said. “We heard you.”
Some data points presented by the foundation related to the new strategic priorities:
» 11.3 percent of adults in Santa Barbara County have no health insurance, according to the Community Health Needs Assessment conducted by Cottage Health in 2016.
» 44,960 people in Santa Barbara County are food-insecure every day, which is about 10 percent of the population, according to the County Food Action Plan.
» Suicide is the second leading cause of injury deaths in Santa Barbara County, of which 90 percent are due to an underlying mental illness, according to the Santa Barbara County Data Notebook for California Behavioral Health Boards and Commissions.
» 1,489 individuals are chronically homeless in Santa Barbara County, as of 2017, according to the Central Coast Collaborative on Homelessness (now Home for Good).
» The average cost of enrolling infants in early care and education centers in Santa Barbara County is $1,171 a month, according to the Early Care and Education Needed Now! Santa Barbara County Child Care Planning Council Needs Assessment of 2017.
» Service jobs are growing at a more rapid pace than other higher-wage-earning and more stable professions.
» In California, the bottom 25 percent of income earners are spending 67 percent of their income on housing.
— Noozhawk managing editor Giana Magnoli can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.

