Meet Nicole Taylor, the powerful foundation CEO who gives away Silicon Valley’s billions

You might not know about the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, unless you work in philanthropy — or you caught stories earlier this year about a mystery donor using the foundation to give $10 million to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s nonprofit.

But since the SVCF was founded in 2007, it has become one of the most powerful vehicles for charitable giving in the United States. With nearly $14 billion in assets, it has emerged as the largest community fund in the world and the go-to for Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings and other tech titans to donate sizable chunks of their fortunes for eventual distribution to chosen causes.

Charismatic president and CEO Nicole Taylor, who has led the foundation since 2018, believes the SVCF should help the most vulnerable. In 2022, she oversaw the distribution of nearly $2.6 billion in grants to more than 5,000 organizations around the world. Nearly $550 million of that went to Bay Area nonprofits, including $154 million to organizations in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. The foundation raised more than $66 million for COVID relief in the Bay Area and continues to work to advance gender, racial and economic justice in the “vastly unequal Silicon Valley,” as Inside Philanthropy said, when it named her its community foundation leader of the year.

SVCF’s first Black female CEO grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant mother who worked as a housekeeper. Taylor made her mother proud by getting into Stanford, but gave up on the idea of becoming a doctor. Instead, she worked as a middle school science teacher in Palo Alto and Oakland. Alarmed by the disparities between the two communities, she “drifted,” she says, into educational leadership and philanthropy, building an impressive resume that included positions as CEO of the East Bay Community Foundation, associate vice provost at Stanford, deputy vice president and dean of students at Arizona State University and vice president of the ASU Foundation.

The nonprofit world praised Taylor for steering SVCF out of a #MeToo scandal; her predecessor stepped down over allegations that he and another executive fostered a toxic workplace. Taylor continues to deal with criticism that SVCF and other large U.S. foundations warehouse America’s wealth and contribute to society’s inequities, instead of distributing their billions to people in need right now.

Much of the criticism focuses on assets kept in SVCF’s 1,200 donor-advised funds. These charitable accounts allow donors to receive big tax breaks for giving away money or stock. There’s no legal requirement that the money ever be distributed, however, which means the public could lose tax revenues that might have gone for services. Critics also say there’s little transparency; money can be doled out anonymously, for example, to Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Foundation.

Q: You came to Stanford to study science. What did you think you wanted to do?

A: As with many immigrants, there’s only a couple of things you’re told you can be. You can be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, right? So I was going to be a doctor, until I took organic chemistry. I called home and said, “Mom, I’m not going to be a doctor, but I’ll figure it out.” I ended up staying at Stanford to get my master’s and teaching credential.

Q: How was it teaching middle-schoolers?

A: I loved them, and it prepared me for any of the issues and the stress in my adult working life. What got to me while teaching were the economic disparities between Palo Alto Unified and Oakland Unified. When I was student teaching (in Palo Alto), I had students who had personal computers at home, and this was before any of us had personal computers at home. In Oakland, they wouldn’t let me have lab equipment. I remember that the head teacher said (the kids) don’t deserve it; they might break the equipment. It was disheartening, and that’s when I decided that I needed to really think about the systemic issues were at play here.

Q: You’ve been credited with healing a demoralized SVCF staff after the scandal. How did you do that?

A: In my career, I’ve entered organizations where they were at an inflection point, sometimes due to a crisis or sometimes due to expansion. So it’s working on culture issues, building trust and respect with constituents, rebuilding operations and really thinking about, what’s the next strategic direction for an organization.

Q: What do you think are the biggest issues facing Silicon Valley now?

A: We have a presidential election coming up in less than 18 months. What is that going to mean for our country? What is that going to mean here in our region? And what role should we be playing?

Q: The region is also coming out of the pandemic…

A: I was only gone (from the Bay Area) for two years and when I came back in 2018, I couldn’t believe the number of RVs parked in front of Stanford. The pandemic just exacerbated all those inequities even more. It increased the number of unhoused folks. It woke people up to what was really happening. You couldn’t ignore it anymore, what was happening on the side of the road. Every community was seeing the disparities.

Q: Critics say that the organization’s structure and those donor-advised funds (DAF) contribute to  inequities. What do you say to that?

A: I would really say the exact opposite is true, because we give out, in any given year, between 15 and 20% of our assets. In 2022, the average payout rate of our advised funds was 20%. Private foundations only have a payout requirement of 5%. We also have a policy that if a donor hasn’t recommended any money from their DAF be given out, we pool and distribute the funds through our Community Endowment Fund.

Q: I’m going to ask a  very naive question here. Why not give out 100% — or 80%, given the costs of managing the funds? Why is a 20% payout considered a lot?