Trisha Garlock brings her experience leading a community foundation for Mill Valley schools with her as director of SchoolsRule-Marin. [Photo by Duncan Garrett Photography]
The path to starting a nonprofit organization begins when someone identifies a need and decides to do something about it. The area of interest might be literacy, an environmental issue, the plight of the unhoused or the search for a cure for a particular disease. The causes are diverse, but what they all have in common is people who care deeply about making some aspect of life better for others. For Trisha Garlock, a founding director of Kiddo! Mill Valley Schools Community Foundation and now
organizations are tax exempt, which allows more funding to go to the cause, and eligible donors can claim tax deductions. “It’s about making the donations tax deductible. To give a tax deduction, you have to be a nonprofit. To apply for grants, you have to be a nonprofit,” she says, adding that the designation also gives an organization credibility. Kiddo started in 1981 and got official nonprofit status in 1982—and that first year, it raised $27,000. Since then, the increase in fundraising for schools has been substantial. In 2022, according to executive director Jessica Newman, Kiddo’s revenues totaled $2.9 million.
executive director of SchoolsRule-Marin, providing support for local schools has been a passion for more than 40 years. She explains that the school fundraising movement began in the early 1980s, after the passage of Proposition 13 caused a decrease in state revenue from property taxes and led California to reduce funding for schools. “We were going to have to cut art and music,” she says about the ripple effect from Prop. 13, and so the PTA ran a bake sale at the Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival to raise funds to supplement the
The National Center for Charitable Statistics reports that the number of nonprofits in the United States has quadrupled over the past 40 years. Linda Jacobs, CEO of the Center for Volunteer & Nonprofit Leadership in San Rafael, believes that a rise in the demand for services over time accounts
for the growth, a situation that she attributes to a government that isn’t providing as much assistance as required and a substantial increase in inequity. She used to think that having too many nonprofits
budget for the Mill Valley School District’s K-8 schools, allowing them to retain classes in the arts. People recognized that good schools with well-rounded programs are a benefit to the community, and so the next step was starting a foundation to create an ongoing way to pay for the programs at risk. “We patterned ourselves on the San Francisco Education Fund,” she says, and the schools in nearby Kentfield had already established a foundation, and their leaders provided advice and guidance. Following those examples, the grassroots Mill Valley group decided to establish a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, because such
was a concern—but her opinion changed about 10 years ago, and now she believes the market dictates the numbers. “The question should be: ‘Is everybody being served?’” she explains. “We tend to step up to fill the gaps,” she observes, and so the number of nonprofits should be based on needs and filling them. An awareness of the needs has also grown, thanks to social media, technology, marketing and education. And donations and donor-advised funds have increased along with the number of nonprofits. She attributes much of the
January 2024
NorthBaybiz 21
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