A Distinctive Blend of Giving

Gerbode fund mixes personal touch with support of unpopular causes

Nearly every weekday morning, Tom Layton, executive director of the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, has coffee with local charity leaders at Caffe Roma, just steps away from the foundation’s offices here in the city’s North Beach neighborhood.

Typically, he schedules a meeting with a foundation grantee or other charity leader for 8 a.m. and another for 9. But if a charity official needs to see him urgently, or if the day is already crammed with appointments, he offers to meet at 6 or 7 a.m.

Mr. Layton, 55, says his goal in holding the morning coffee klatches is to demonstrate to grantees that he is interested in getting to know about them and their organizations.

“It’s not just courteousness, it’s smart business,” he says. “I want people to be as relaxed and as straightforward as possible so I can learn as much as possible.”

That open approach to grantees has won Gerbode — and Mr. Layton — high marks in the non-profit world. The $65-million foundation is known not only for its personal interest in grant recipients but also for its willingness to support new ideas, as well as charities that work on unpopular causes. Gerbode’s successful work has often been a catalyst for larger grant makers, many of which have expanded on the foundation’s efforts in areas such as abortion rights, conflict resolution, and conservation.

While not all of Gerbode’s grant making is done over coffee, some of its most significant grants have been conceived at early-bird meetings at Caffe Roma.

Mary Bitterman, president of KQED, San Francisco’s public radio and television station, recalls a pivotal meeting in the early ‘90s, when the station was experiencing severe financial difficulty.

Ms. Bitterman was meeting with Mr. Layton at Caffe Roma when he said to her: “Name something that would allow you to leap ahead and address some of the concerns,” she recalls. Ms. Bitterman suggested a project that would help the station reach out to people in the city. Out of that conversation developed Neighborhoods: the Hidden Cities of San Francisco, a series of documentaries that examine the city’s history by looking at enclaves such as Chinatown and the Castro District. Gerbode provided not only the spark that led to the idea but also $165,000 to turn it into a reality. The episode on the Castro District has won a George Foster Peabody Award, a highly regarded award to honor broadcasters for public service. And the series helped bring in much-needed financial support for KQED.

“Some people wanted to wait until we resolved all of the financial problems before they felt their grants might be a good investment,” Ms. Bitterman says. “But the Gerbode Foundation was right there from the start.”

The conversations in which Mr. Layton so eagerly engages have done much to increase his influence, especially since his foundation gives so little compared with many other well-known grant makers. This year, it will give about $3-million.

Cole Wilbur, executive director of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, in Los Altos, Cal., says, “Tom has been able to accomplish an awful lot by both listening and getting involved in issues where he can make a difference, and then sticking with them.” He adds: “If you don’t have a lot of money, reaching the right people is extremely important.”

Among some of the groundbreaking areas in which Gerbode has made grants:

Conflict resolution. Twenty years ago, Gerbode provided seed money to the Community Boards Program, in San Francisco, an organization that sought to avoid lawsuits by finding alternative mediation techniques. Experts say the program is the progenitor of 500 different programs throughout the United States. “It was Tom who recognized the possibilities in the movement,” says Steve Toben, a program officer of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has financed conflict resolution since 1984 and now awards about $10.5-million to such programs annually. “We really stand on Tom’s shoulders here. We’ve done a lot of work with community-mediation programs that he helped put on the map.”

End-of-life issues. The fund started supporting the hospice field in the mid-1970s, before many grant makers were involved. In addition, it has given about $1-million to groups that push for physician-assisted suicide to be made legal. While several foundations in recent years have started to make grants to improve health care for dying patients, few grant makers have been willing to support groups that deal directly with the suicide issue. Mr. Layton says that such support has brought the foundation the most “overt criticism” of its grant making.

Environment. When the Trust for Public Land opened its doors in 1973, Gerbode gave the organization some of its first financing. The money was intended to help the trust with its work of turning land into protected open spaces, including public parks and community gardens in San Francisco and Oakland. Jennie Gerard, who has been with the trust for 21 years and is its senior vice-president for external affairs, says that while the idea of preserving such spaces is commonly accepted now, it was “a really new idea” in the early 1970s. “The Gerbode Foundation understood it and supported it,” she says.

Reproductive rights. Gerbode was one of the first grant makers to support groups that sought to keep abortion legal in the mid-1970s, a time when few grant makers were getting involved in the abortion debate. Even though Mr. Layton received a death threat for the foundation’s involvement in this area, the fund continued to make grants to such organizations. Today, it still finances such causes, including the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Catholics for a Free Choice. And in 1996, the foundation made a $250,000 equity investment in the Danco Group, a New York for-profit company that hopes to manufacture and distribute RU-486, a drug that can be used to abort a fetus during the early weeks of pregnancy.

Such investments have played an important role at Gerbode, which has frequently gone beyond simple grant making to accomplish its goals. It has made more than $4-million in so-called program-related investments since 1975.

While Gerbode has gotten involved in some of the nation’s most emotional and controversial front-page issues, it has nevertheless managed to keep a low profile. The fund’s officials deliberately operate behind the scenes because they believe that is a key to success.

Earlier this year, however, Gerbode found itself in a high-profile position after Mr. Layton received the Council on Foundations’ Robert W. Scrivner Award, which honors grant makers who are creative and willing to take risks.

Mr. Layton appreciated the honor but said he was not the only one who should have received credit. He notes that the board votes on all grants. What’s more, he says, it’s not the grant maker who should be praised for taking risks. “Risks involve consequences, and it’s our grantees who take the consequences,” he says. Mr. Layton donated the award’s $10,000 to 10 of his favorite charities, which he declined to name for “not wanting anyone left out to feel badly,” he says.

The foundation’s approach to philanthropy is a direct reflection of the traditions and traits of its founder, Martha Alexander Gerbode. Born in San Francisco in 1909, Mrs. Gerbode was a descendant of a Congregationalist missionary family — today the United Church of Christ — that moved to Hawaii from New England in 1830. Her grandfather helped found the international sugar company Alexander & Baldwin, which today generates more than $1-billion in revenue.

Maryanna Gerbode Stockholm, Martha’s daughter and the cur rent chairman of the foundation’s board, says her mother, who died in 1971, believed in helping the underdog and had a passionate interest in the social issues of her day — especially conservation and family planning.

“My mother really didn’t care what people thought — she was interested in doing what she thought was right,” Ms. Stockholm says. “She was an activist, and had the ability to act independently, stand alone, and to be bold.”

Despite her wealth, Mrs. Gerbode lived modestly. She drove a Rambler and insisted on wearing the same camel’s hair coat for years — until it was almost in rags. At first, Mrs. Gerbode did much of her philanthropy informally and tried to maintain a low profile, recalls her daughter. But, she adds, “she kept doing things that took her into the spotlight.”

For instance, Mrs. Gerbode received much press attention in the 1960s for her efforts to keep the Diamond Head promontory in Honolulu from being trampled by the fast-growing hotel industry. Her efforts turned into a movement that led to a prohibition on construction of buildings over 40 feet tall on Diamond Head. In San Francisco, the local papers dubbed her the Alcatraz Island “angel” for her work to promote the federal government’s efforts to turn the island into a park.

In 1961, Mrs. Gerbode turned her informal grant making into the foundation that exists today. She named it in memory of her son, Wallace Alexander Gerbode, who had died in a car accident just before his 19th birthday.

Today, the foundation continues Mrs. Gerbode’s no-frills approach. None of the foundation’s five trustees are paid for their services, and the foundation has just two full-time employees, who together earn $162,000.

The fund’s offices are small and modestly decorated, and little is spent on promotional materials. Rather than printing an expensive annual report, it publishes a small pamphlet that it makes on one of the foundation’s personal computers. And it is not uncommon to receive information from the fund on paper whose reverse sides have been previously used.

“I always have the sense from Gerbode that every dollar is precious to them,” says Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, in Sacramento. “A lot of foundations seem to spend a lot of money on glossy annual reports and putting on conferences — not that there’s anything wrong with that — but with myself watching every dollar, I feel more comfortable working with foundations that understand that.”

Gerbode does more than just emulate the modest style of its founder. It also carries out her interests, especially in its work in Hawaii. It has given $9.6-million to Hawaiian causes since 1975. In 1980, Gerbode played a strong role in establishing the Nature Conservancy’s Hawaii and Pacific program. At the time, the Nature Conservancy was having problems there because it had been trying to run programs from both San Francisco and its headquarters in Arlington, Va., prompting criticism that the organization did not understand the Hawaiian people and their culture, says Kelvin Taketa, former head of the Asia Pacific Region of the Nature Conservan cy. Gerbode introduced influential Hawaiian leaders to conservancy officials and convinced them that the way to make a difference was to work from Hawaii.

More recently, Mr. Layton was a key figure in persuading the Council on Foundations to hold its 1997 annual conference in Honolulu, despite objections from grant makers who feared that doing so would cause the meeting to be ridiculed as a junket. Mr. Layton, who was on the council’s board for seven years, says he would often show up to its retreats in Hawaiian shirts to emphasize the point. Ultimately, the council’s board voted 22 to 6 to hold the meeting in Hawaii.

“It was important for me to get people there,” says Mr. Layton. “Not to necessarily get grants there, but just to experience the place and recognize that this is part of America.”

A year later, Mr. Layton says he is optimistic that Hawaii “is now on the radar screen for a number of national funders, when it wasn’t before the conference.”

Regardless of whether more grant makers decide to invest dollars in Hawaii, Gerbode’s contributions to preserving the Hawaiian land and its culture are always likely to be considered significant.

In the 1980s, the Hawaiian language was in danger of dying out, primarily because, for nearly a century, state law had prohibited teaching the language in school. Bill Wilson co-founded ‘Aha Punana Leo (which means “the language nest” in Hawaiian) to get the law nullified and to help teach the Hawaiian language in schools and universities.

Even after the charity successfully lobbied for the prohibition to be removed in 1986, the idea still created controversy. But that did not deter Gerbode from giving ‘Aha Punana Leo support — even though the fund was criticized and accused of creating another “Quebecois.”

Today, however, there is a resurgence of the Hawaiian language and culture as more than 2,000 students have received instruction from preschools to universities, and the issue is considered “apple pie,” Mr. Layton says.

He adds: “This may well turn out to be one of the most important things we’ve ever done.”