Hoping for
At The Good Cookie, a new Santa Barbara bakery with its products now on the shelves at Whole Foods Market, the employees are clients of the Casa Esperanza Homeless Center. They work nights in the center’s kitchen, where they learn job skills and earn money to get themselves off the streets. The revenues support Casa Read More →
SLO nonprofit guides way to green
Green Building Pages, a nonprofit based in San Luis Obispo, was started by architect Marilyn Miller Farmer with a simple goal: to make sustainable building more accessible. When Farmer first started as an architect, she wanted to focus on sustainable design, but she kept running into trouble finding reasonably priced green materials. Her brainchild, Green Read More →
Keeping the seats full: Arts organizations battle the recession
A recession is never a pretty picture, especially for arts and culture nonprofits, which rely heavily on private donations and visitor attendance. Arts organizations around the country laid off workers last year, adopted hiring freezes or cut other expenses in response to a falloff in private donations and government grants. In California, the Santa Read More →
Searching for survivors
The massive earthquake that rumbled through Haiti on Jan. 12 left the capital city of Port-au-Prince buried underneath piles and piles of debris, twisted metal, fallen trees and shattered concrete — and underneath that, countless human survivors clinging desperately to the last remnants of life. Often, the first sign of hope survivors hear in the Read More →
Abuse survivor advocates for cause
Tracy Sanginiti didn’t look like the kind of woman who would be pushed around. Young and sharp, she was the catering director at a hotel in Northern California and the breadwinner of her household. To outsiders, her future looked bright — but her life had a much darker side to it. “I wore a Read More →
Social Venture Partners debuts as nonprofit, business collaboration
Some of the most prominent members of Santa Barbara’s business community are banding together to make an investment in the area’s nonprofit sector through a new Santa Barbara initiative called Social Venture Partners. Members of the area’s nonprofit and business sectors spoke about their new collaboration at a press conference at the Santa Barbara Foundation’s Read More →
Taking a step back
Sometimes you just need a break from saving the world. Or, as Sigrid Wright, assistant director at the Community Environmental Council in Santa Barbara, explains, “Sometimes you just need to be able to go into a room for two days and not have to solve a problem.” That’s what Courage to Lead, a new Santa Read More →
