The Stupski Foundation is investing in strategies that will address some of the Bay Area’s and Hawai‘i’s biggest challenges. Specifically, we:
- Shift power to communities to ensure people have the food they need to live active, healthy lives.
- Ensure students from low-income communities and students of color are equipped to complete the higher education of their choice and pursue a life and career that fulfills them.
- Ensure that babies and toddlers from families struggling to make ends meet have the integrated health and social services that will help them develop and thrive.
- Provide people living with a serious illness with health care and emotional support that respects their wishes and enables them to live out the remainder of their lives with comfort and dignity.
To make a significant impact within our spend down timeframe, we focus on partners who primarily serve our communities in San Francisco and Alameda Counties and the state of Hawai‘i.
In the Bay Area and Hawai‘i, too many members of our communities, particularly communities of color, face societal barriers and are left out of opportunities in their own backyards. That is why Stupski is spending all of our assets by 2029 to make the greatest possible change in our communities today. Learn more about our spend down.
Stupski stays in close contact with our partners. We commit to regularly engage community leaders in our decision-making through the end of our spend down. We honor our grantee partners’ expertise and lived experiences, recognizing that they know what solutions work best for their communities.
In this spirit, we have restructured our Food Security strategy to center on community-led initiatives that build food system resilience and increase residents’ access to quality and culturally relevant food. In partnership with the Haas Jr. Fund, we have joined a participatory grantmaking effort, Haas Learning Labs, which brings together multigenerational community members around issues in postsecondary success that impact their lives and guides them to collectively design the futures they want to see. We are also engaging community stakeholders in our hiring, grants administration, and communications work.
Stupski regularly shares grantee stories and elevates community voices via our Change Can’t Wait blog. We are dedicated to sharing what we learn as we learn it and seeking constant feedback. To honor this commitment, we launched a student internship program to integrate more student voices into our Postsecondary Success work. Through our partnership with the Hawai‘i Community Foundation and other local contacts, we consistently gather input on our strategies in Hawai‘i to reflect the local context and address emerging community needs.
To support the long-term success of our grantee partners after we close our doors, we invest in capacity building, cohort building, and peer learning across our strategies. We connect our grantee partners with other funders aligned with their work to enhance collaboration, and we regularly highlight our partners’ work across our communications channels to elevate their work.
Occasionally, we post invitations for funding to our grant seekers page and on our blog. We also reach out to organizations when we identify a potential partnership opportunity. Sign up for our newsletter to receive notifications about funding opportunities.
Stupski primarily funds organizations in San Francisco and Alameda Counties and across the state of Hawai‘i that address early brain development, food security, postsecondary success, and serious illness care. Learn about our current grantees in our grant directory, and browse a list of our past grantee partners here.
Larry and Joyce Stupski were committed to giving back to the communities they called home—the Bay Area and Hawai‘i. As the former president and chief operating officer of Charles Schwab Corp., Larry was passionate about using his success to create opportunities for others. Joyce, a longtime entrepreneur and former educator, shared that vision applied her love of the arts, business acumen, and experiences working with students and families to the couple’s philanthropy. In 2014, Joyce established the Foundation as a spend down to continue their commitment and honor Larry’s memory following his passing. Joyce led the spend down until her passing in 2021 and oversaw over $155 million in grant-giving toward her spend down vision. Learn more about Joyce and Larry.
Larry and Joyce Stupski were committed to giving back to the communities they called home—the Bay Area and Hawai‘i. The Stupski Foundation funds the same issue areas in both places, although we customize our approaches to the unique context of each community.
Stupski invests in community leaders and organizations at the front lines of addressing the most urgent issues impacting the communities we call home. We work hand in hand with our partners to elevate communities as active decision-makers in tackling the challenges we are both working to solve. We strive to take bold action to reach the most people and drive meaningful change long after we close our doors.
Our partners help us stay on track and challenge our assumptions. We commit to adapting to meet our community’s evolving needs. Stupski welcomes grantees to provide feedback directly to staff to ensure we collaborate with and support our partners effectively. Because we are iterating rapidly to identify what works and promote lasting solutions, we also ask for grantee feedback regularly throughout the grant process. Additionally, we collect feedback through surveys to provide grantees a channel to share their input anonymously. In 2021, we completed our first year of gathering feedback through the Grantee Perception Report with the Center for Effective Philanthropy.