Every year, San Diego Social Venture Partners hosts a funding cycle where our Partners vote to fund a few Investees within a chosen topic area. However, this is not the only way that we are committed to investing and staying involved in our community. We believe in the power of collaboration. We successfully co-funded our current Investees from the 2018 Early Child Development funding cycle, Traveling Stories and American Academy of Pediatrics-California Chapter 3, with the San Diego Women's Foundation. We see the great work that organizations throughout the region are doing, and we wonder how we can continue to work together to make positive change.
Most recently, we saw San Diego Grantmakers create the Women's Empowerment Loan Fund (WELF), a loan created to enable women-owned businesses to grow, create jobs, and improve our local economy. WELF combines financing with expert business coaching to ensure recipients have what they need to help their business grow. Through WELF, loan recipients can also demonstrate positive credit, increasing future access to other forms of financing. SDSVP has a long-standing partnership with San Diego Grantmakers, and we were pleased to approve $25,000 to invest in WELF. We see the vision of this fund for a more equitable future, opening up possibilities for women in San Diego and inspiring our community to support these women with the resources, network, and tools they need to thrive.
To us, community means connection, and we believe in making philanthropy all about the real connections that we can make as caring and informed San Diegans to leverage time, talent, and treasure to make real change. We realize this kind of work requires working relationships and trust (another one of our values, more on that in another post) to be successful. Energized by our partnerships and collaborations with organizations like San Diego Grantmakers and the Women's Foundation, we couldn't be more excited to give back to our community, together!
Social Venture Partners allows the unique opportunity for caring and informed San Diegans to give in a strategic and highly skilled way. Our Partners not only donate money that is pooled into unrestricted grants for multi-year support, but they also donate their time to help nonprofits develop their infrastructure. This assistance gives nonprofits a higher level of capacity to deliver on their own missions. Both kinds of Partner contributions support each other, allowing for SVP to increase our impact by leveraging our collective skills, networks, and dollars.
Interested in joining? Email our Executive Director, Sierra Visher Kroha at sierra@sdsvp.org for more information.