News
November 2020
|San Francisco
Grantee Spotlight: Meals on Wheels San Francisco
Since 1970, Meals on Wheels San Francisco has provided homebound seniors with what they need to live independent and dignified lives—nutritious meals prepared and delivered to their homes, professional social work services including wellness and safety checks, and a friendly visitor. Now in its 50th year, the nonprofit has opened a new industrial kitchen and distribution facility after the previous one reached its meal-making capacity limits at 8,000 meals daily. The new kitchen, located in The Sangiacomo Flynn Building, will accommodate the production of up to 30,000 nutritious meals daily.
October 2020
|San Francisco
Grantee Spotlight: GLIDE
GLIDE is a nationally recognized center for social justice, dedicated to fighting systemic injustices, creating pathways out of poverty and crisis, and transforming lives. Through its free meals program, integrated comprehensive services, advocacy initiatives, and inclusive community, GLIDE empowers individuals, families and children to achieve stability and thrive. GLIDE is on the forefront of addressing society’s most pressing issues, including poverty, housing and homelessness, and racial and social justice.
October 2020
|Santa Clara
Grantee Spotlight: Second Harvest of Silicon Valley
Second Harvest of Silicon Valley is one of the largest food banks in the nation and a leader in ending local hunger. The nonprofit distributes nutritious groceries through a network of partners at sites across Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. Due to the high cost of living in Silicon Valley and the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, hunger is at an all-time high. Second Harvest is now serving 500,000 people on average every month, which is twice as many people as they reached pre-pandemic.
October 2020
|San Francisco
Gladstone Institutes researcher wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Gladstone Senior Investigator Jennifer Doudna, PhD, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her transformative discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 system, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD. The gene-editing tool allows researchers to cut DNA in order to remove, replace, or add genes to a sequence, and has been adopted around the world to identify therapeutic targets, diagnose viral infection, and repair genetic mutations. Doudna joined Gladstone in 2018 to apply her technology to biomedical problems, while continuing her lab at UC Berkeley, where she has been a professor since 2002.
April 2020
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Koret Grantees: Adapting to the challenges of COVID-19
The COVID-19 virus has upended life for individuals and communities everywhere. The pandemic has spread not only infection, but also wide-reaching uncertainty as to when “normal life” might resume. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Koret grantees innovated quickly in response to the mandate to shelter in place and to socially distance. Unlike in previous […]
July 2019
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Community Building: The Mission Continues
As they return to civilian life, many veterans experience a loss of purpose and community away from their military units and the people they have come to trust in perilous situations. Without that community, there are many veterans who withdraw and don’t have a lot of communication with others, and are consequently at risk of […]
July 2019
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Workforce development: Goodwill of the San Francisco Bay
Historically in the United States, there used to be explicit preferences for hiring veterans in many industries and in the civil service. But as we’ve moved away from the draft and toward a volunteer military, only a subset of veterans gets training in technology that is readily transferable to the private sector. There are many […]
July 2019
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Physical and mental healthcare: Higher Ground
Higher Ground uses recreational therapy with counseling resources to address symptoms of PTSD and traumatic brain injuries and teach veterans to cope with the challenges of readjusting to civilian life. It does so by rekindling the skills they learned in the service through activities like skiing and water sports in a nonthreatening and supportive environment, […]
July 2019
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Koret’s Veterans Initiative: Serving those who have served our country
In the spring of 2019, Koret launched a new grantmaking initiative to support local military veterans. In this new initiative, several high-performing organizations were selected for their work in addressing key barriers for returning service members as they rejoin civilian life in the Bay Area. We sat down with Koret President Michael Boskin to hear […]
October 2017
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Koret Food Program: Serving diverse communities more than food
The Koret Food Program, one of the Foundation’s longest-standing initiatives, was special to our founder, Joseph Koret, because of this personal experience as a child in New York City. Mr. Koret grew up in a family that today would be classified as “working poor.” Later in life, he enjoyed telling the story of fishing for […]