When the economy fell into a deep recession two years ago, we wanted to do something to help. In growing numbers, local families needed assistance with food, shelter and emergency support. At the same time, nonprofits serving these families were struggling financially.

What constructive role could the Community Foundation play?

To answer this question, we tried to be clear, from the start, about what we wanted to accomplish. For example, did we want to focus only on food? This would have been one way to reach a lot of people with fairly limited dollars, since feeding programs are generally less expensive to operate than other social service programs.

For instance, the cost of an hour of mental health therapy ranges from $60 to $100 in Napa County, even in a nonprofit setting where the end-user may not actually be presented with an invoice. This is enough to purchase and deliver up to 20 hot meals through the Senior Meals on Wheels program. Other feeding programs, such as The Table, rely on donated product and volunteer labor, and can therefore stretch $100 to assist even more people.

We decided to expand the scope of our efforts beyond food for two reasons. First, from surveying nonprofits that work closely with vulnerable families, we knew that other important services were in very high demand. Second, with the grant dollars we had available, we could have filled known budget gaps in the food sector, and covered the cost of increased demand for at least three years, with money left over, standing idle.

While our grant budget was too large to work only on food, we didn't have sufficient resources to fund all the nonprofit agencies we would've liked to at a meaningful level. For this reason, we developed a fairly narrow definition of the social safety net for Napa County. Our intention was to provide timely and significant grant support in the critical areas identified by our nonprofit partners: food, shelter and emergency support to families.

We also wanted to be prevention-focused where possible, and to concentrate our dollars on programs serving beleaguered heads-of-household, in hopes that by offering aid to them, whole families might do better. Here are the things we chose to include in our Safety Net Grants portfolio:

• Food programs, a core area of need where relatively small dollars can go a long way.

It is often easier to pick a number than to pick a strategy.

Once we determined which sectors of the safety net we were going to work on, it wasn't difficult for us to identify key players in each sector, and settle on dollar amounts for recipient organizations.

In a world of unlimited resources, you might look at the gap between the demand for services and the supply of dollars for each agency, and endeavor to fill it up.

In the real world, we looked at the budget of each organization and the number of people they serve, and chose grant amounts accordingly. Our goal was to place more dollars with agencies that were helping more people. A guiding principal was to offer support to each organization that was meaningful, but also proportional. In most cases, our partners have received grants from us, in the last fifteen months, equivalent to 5 percent to 10 percent of their annual operating budgets.

The pie chart above provides an illustration of our Safety Net Grants portfolio, by recipient organization. Once again, percentage amounts are for the first three rounds of discretionary grant distributions made by the Community Foundation, totaling $559,250 through March 31, 2010.

If you were going to build an index fund for meeting basic human needs at a critical moment for our community, given the limitations noted above, we think you'd wind up with a portfolio that looks a lot like this one. Given the still-tenuous nature of the overall economy, and the blistering fiscal misery of the state of California, we suspect there might be a need for future investments to strengthen the safety net in Napa County, and would welcome your support in that regard.