SVCN News

Justice is healing. Ma’Khia Bryant was a Black girl who, as shared by her mother, was smart and sweet. On social media, she shared with us the joy and art of styling her curly hair, dancing, singing along to songs, and smiling warmly. She was everything a kid should be. But sadly, her youth and joy didn’t protect her from racism and the cruel police system. Somewhere, in the fleeting moment of relief that we may have felt when watching the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin, she

Call to Action: Your Voice Matters Marissa Martinez We wake up wondering About how we look, how we speak, how we do How we interact with others How others interact with us How when we look up They look down We speak big on the small things Small on the big things And either way, Who listens? We have hands And legs And mouths Capable of so much Doing so little They talked And protested And stood And sat And marched For hours, days, months, years Just to be heard Le

A message from Kyra + the SVCN Team The end of 2020 brings with it so many dualities. What a difficult and yet remarkable year for our community and for nonprofits. There is so much loss – and yet there are new partnerships and skills forged in fires of crisis. We have been witness to great injustices – and yet we have coalesced towards fighting for equity and racial justice and seem poised to make meaningful advances in this cause. The near and far-term future is so uncertai

Last week, nonprofits came together to fundraise for SVCN, share some lighthearted moments, and, most importantly, honor nonprofits, nonprofit leaders, and nonprofit allies for their powerful work over the last very difficult seven months. Unfortunately, this week, we must withdraw the Nonprofit Ally Award that SVCN gave to the Silicon Valley Organization (SVO). Many of you have seen by now the image of the SVO webpage depicting Black protesters on a street surrounded by clou

Thrive Alliance and Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits stand together with our two-county nonprofit alliance to express our sorrow about the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many other Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color (BIPOC) who experience systemic and institutional violence. Although the nonprofit community, at its best, has allied with communities of color and low-income communities to pursue social justice and dismantle

Dear nonprofit friends and friends of nonprofits, I wish that every message to you all did not have to include the words pandemic or COVID-19, but here we are. And it’s not news to you all that COVID-19 is negatively impacting all aspects of nonprofit organizations and nonprofit staff’s day-to-day lives. But I’m saying it anyway to acknowledge that now doesn’t feel like a great time to ask nonprofits and nonprofit allies for help. But. As you know, SVCN is a membership organi

Has it only been 1344 hours, 16 minutes, and 20 seconds since we started Shelter In Place? It seems like 2798 hours, 32 minutes, and 40 seconds. I know so many of you have your heads down, working long hours to address our community's critical needs, but I'd like to take five short minutes of your time to talk about some of the many, many incredible efforts I've been lucky enough to witness in our community in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Here's how many: 100,000. That's

SVCN has actively been advocating with city, county, state, and federal governments for community services and nonprofit support in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has included advocacy to grant flexibility to nonprofit contractors within existing government contracts. We worked with the Behavioral Health Contractors’ Association to submit policy guidance to the County of Santa Clara to minimize disruptions to payments to nonprofit contractors during the pandemic, mod

With now almost three dozen known coronavirus cases and the first death of a community member in Santa Clara County, our community is very much coming to terms with the new reality of the local effects of this global pandemic. Over the last few days, nonprofit leaders have made hard but necessary decisions to restrict travel, cancel events, allow or even encourage staff to work remotely, and make and start to implement plans about how to serve our community in a very differen

In case you haven't heard, plans for our Activate Your Impact policy summit are well underway, and the team is very excited by what we already have lined up: We'll hear a keynote from Dale Ho, Director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, who led the team that successfully argued before the Supreme Court against including a citizenship question in the 2020 Census. His team's efforts are immortalized in The Fight, a new documentary that was just picked up for distribution at t