Will Venture Philanthropy Be A New Trend Among New Generation?
Laura Arrillaga Will Be Honored For Community Service
By Fang Fang

Together with three other women, Laura Arrillaga, the co-chair of Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund (known as SV2), will be honored for her leadership in community service at the Jacqueline Kennedy Awards Dinner Oct. 28 in San Jose.

A beautiful lady, with long blond hair and sweet smile, Laura Arrillaga is the daughter of real estate magnate and philanthropist John Arrillaga. Largely affected by her family, when Laura graduate from the Business School at Stanford University in 1997, she had deeply engaged in quite a many non-profit organizations. And shortly after that, with a group of dynamic individuals, she managed to create SV2 under the help of Community Foundation of Silicon Valley (CFSV) in June 1999.

Reported by San Jose Mercury News, Ruth Spangenberg, a JFK University director who selects awardees, says it was Arrillaga’s involvement with the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund that caught her eye.

This March, SV2 announced $225,000 STRENGTH Grant Award to Child Advocates of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties; it has also given grants to Eastside College and Preparatory School, Downtown College Preparatory School in San Jose and Project HELP.

Standing out of those achievements of SV2, Laura Arrillaga does think, SV2, based upon the Venture Philanthropy model, “is quite different from the traditional non-profit organizations”. As manifested in SV2’s website, SV2’s goal is to help create “Silicon Valley’s new generation of philanthropists”. Arrillaga think that although Silicon Valley is a young community with a relatively short history of organized philanthropy, today’s new generation with incredible wealth is not uninterested in charitable causes, as some media stories accused —the problem is that most of them often lack the time or the experience to evaluate or engaged in social sectors.

So, employing the popular partnerships concept in Silicon Valley, SV2 seeks to educate and inform its partners on philanthropy and creates a network of Silicon Valley’s young professionals who invest both financial and intellectual capital to support local non-profit organizations to run more efficiently and effectively. What may seem especially attractive to the taste of those Silicon Valley elites is that SV2 claims its partners, first, can directly involve in philanthropy by determining funding priorities and selecting nonprofit investments themselves; and second, can learn how to leverage their pool of expertise and money. “The change that we can effect together is so much greater than we could do individually.” Arrillaga told San Jose Mercury News several days before.

SV2 is not the only one based upon the Venture Philanthropy model, nor dose it the only one that focuses on the “new generation”. Seattle-based Social Venture Partner (known as SVP), mentioned by Arrillaga as “the front runner in the Venture Philanthropy movement”, also claims its aim is to “ catalyzing a new generation of social investors”, especially those high-tech philanthropists. What’s even more interesting is that among the eleven leading venture philanthropy groups around the country, five of them based in California, and three of them based in Palo Alto, the core of high-tech in the States.

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