The ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’ report — an update

 March 11, 2020 by Fred Allebach

I recently spoke with Katherine Fulton, one of the principal authors of the Sonoma Valley Fund’s Hidden in Plain Sight study and asked for an update and progress report.

Background. Hidden was written pre-fire in the Spring of 2017. The study addressed how the valley charity sector, consisting of specific programs, non-profits, and donors, could come together and more effectively deal with the critical issues of affordable housing, poverty, and aging. Hidden’s intent was to address charity-sector, visionary, and high-order organizational issues. Since 2017, two bad fire seasons have made housing, poverty, and senior issues all worse, and strained all local capacity to address them.

Sonoma Valley is unique, Fulton said, in that it has a large charity sector but no overarching foundation or entity to provide a unified vision. Hidden also noted an inconvenient truth, that the contiguous urban lower valley, the fourth largest “city” in the county, is fragmented into two different government entities, which makes addressing common issues less effective, like having two captains with different crews for one ship.

Fulton said first off that she would change Hidden’s focus to now include government and business, along with the charity sector. Fulton sees a more local focus as necessary in the future.  

Among business, government, and charity sectors, “whose job is it to provide vision and leadership?” she asked. Who can bring the community together to address and mitigate the quantifiably negative trends emphasized in the Hidden study?

Progress on Hidden in Plain Sight issues raised? Two examples. One, Sustainable Sonoma (SuSo) represents a combined Sonoma Valley Fund and Sonoma Ecology Center effort to provide leadership and address valley housing issues. SuSo is attempting to create the large-level organization needed to loop in cross-sector actors and resources to collectively support needed housing types. SuSo is now in the final stages of producing a report titled Homes for a Sustainable Sonoma Valley: Strategic Recommendations for Our Community. Two, the Vintage House has raised the visibility of senior issues, with an Impact 100 grant-funded study on housing and senior poverty that has resulted in a shared housing initiative.

The charity sector currently has three main issues. One, large non-profits are having trouble retaining talented staff. Two, there is a change of guard in the donor community, a sun-setting of a very generous generation and the new donor class coming in is less engaged in the community. Three, gentrification is exacerbating poverty, housing, and aging issues; local costs are too high, and wages and fixed income are not enough to keep up.

Fulton, acknowledging that issues have become worse, said it is “important to look forward.” The charity sector is made up of independent non-profits and independent donors, and there still exists the need to connect these resources to higher-level problem analysis and vision. When issues are well defined and organized, the charity sector could play a stronger role.

Donors need structures to engage with, there needs to be fundraising capacity to organize donors, and a well-documented plan is needed; this is the type of charity sector organizing muscle needed to move on salient community issues.

Going forward. In lieu of taking the leadership and vision bull by the horns, the Sonoma Valley Fund has recently followed through on its co-creation of the Sustainable Sonoma process, by backing local “top-tier” non-profits and others, in a three-year effort to advance the quality of local non-profit-provided services.

Higher order problems? Locally we seem to be fighting symptoms of a larger cause. Fulton pointed out that as a society we are now harvesting 1980s, Reagan-inspired, anti-government policy. In the liberal Bay Area, many see it as the government’s job to define the public good, and act as the structural backstop for market excesses, and to provide the context on which private action rides.

For a Hidden update and progress report, Fulton said it’s easier to identify problems than it is to go about solving them. A unified local house, of government, charity, and business sectors, will have a better chance of addressing the real problems identified by the Hidden in Plain Sight study.