State to Investigate Bay Area Charity

The state attorney general’s office has agreed to investigate claims that a large Marin County charity operates a funding monopoly that ignores minority concerns, including the need for more affordable housing, officials said this week.

A special assistant attorney general met Friday in San Francisco with 45 Latino activists who say that little of the Marin Community Foundation’s $50 million in annual grants goes to the needy.

“I told them that we would look into their concerns,” Elsa Ortiz Cashman said. “We’re going to look into how the trust spends its money.”

Activists say the foundation--one of the nation’s three largest trusts, with $1.2 billion in assets--has chosen environmental causes over the needs of the poor, including 30,000 Latinos who work as maids, gardeners and baby-sitters in one of the state’s wealthiest counties.

Housing activists recently barged into a National Philanthropy Day lunch in San Francisco to pass out fliers saying the trust had defied a court order to use the fortune left by philanthropist Beryl Buck to “care for the needy” in Marin County.

Last week, they presented the state with 500 petitions that called for an audit of the trust’s grant-making practices.

Foundation officials call the accusations unfair and say they have been singled out.

Thomas Peters, the trust’s president and chief executive, on Monday downplayed the seriousness of the state’s decision.

“Activists allege there is some standard by which we are being held in regard to our funding, and that’s not the case,” he said. “We’re a foundation operating like hundreds of others, doing our best to make balancing decisions on the many needs of our community.”

Peters denied that the attorney general was investigating his trust.

“These people did what anybody else could do--they went into the attorney general’s office to express their concerns and opinions, and the state, as a matter of routine, said, ‘We’ll look into it.’ That’s all there is to it,” he said.

Sandra Michioku, a spokeswoman for Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, said state officials would soon be contacting Marin Community Foundation officials.

“We’re going to take a look at this complaint,” she said. “Our Charitable Trust Section will ask them to provide us with an explanation of how they fund causes. That’s basically how we’d deal with any complaint.”

Robert Gnaizda, policy director of a San Francisco public policy and advocacy group called the Greenlining Institute, said the foundation has twisted the definition of the term “needy” in the wealthy county.

“We want them to determine how a person who makes $72,000 a year is poor and needy,” he said of the foundation. By funding environmental causes, he said, the trust actually gives “more money to those who oppose affordable housing than to those who seek affordable housing.”

Kerry Pierson, a member of the Marin County Human Rights Commission who founded Poor and Needy Advocates of Marin, applauded the state’s decision.

“We welcome their involvement,” he said. “Because any outsider will see how this system the foundation has developed has moved to ignore the poor and needy in Marin. They’re just not serving the people they’re supposed to serve.”