By Ella Feldman, Bloomberg
If you’re sitting on an idea for improving San Francisco, billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz’s personal foundation might give you $50 million to execute it.
An open-call competition called Boundless San Francisco, announced Wednesday, will award up to $150 million to as many as three organizations with ideas for improving life in the California city, which has struggled with post-pandemic population loss amid an affordability crisis. Winning applicants will receive as much as $50 million each to bring their proposals to life — an award size that eclipses similar city-based project competitions.
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The contest is a collaboration between Crankstart, the philanthropy run by Moritz and artist Harriet Heyman, and Lever for Change, a nonprofit that connects philanthropists to organizations. Entrants can be based anywhere, and their proposals can be in any discipline, as long as they are designed to primarily benefit San Francisco.
“The best ideas rarely come from where you expect them,” Moritz, 71, said in an emailed statement.
A long-serving Sequoia Capital partner, Moritz built his reputation by investing in companies including Google, YouTube and PayPal Holdings Inc. Boundless San Francisco, which encourages out-of-the-box ideas, echoes the venture capital ethos, Crankstart Chief Executive Officer Missy Narula said.
The contest is Moritz’s latest effort to improve San Francisco, the city he has called home for more than four decades. His family foundation, one of the Bay Area’s largest, has dedicated more than $1 billion to nonprofits and advocacy groups in the region since 2020, according to a Bloomberg calculation based on public documents.
The foundation funds causes ranging from college scholarships to museums to reproductive care access. In June, Crankstart — named for how car engines were booted prior to electric starters — pledged $9.2 million to combat illegal dumping in Oakland after voters rejected a tax measure that would have raised funds to do so.
Private philanthropy has increasingly financed municipal services in San Francisco in recent years. That’s been especially true under Mayor Daniel Lurie, 49, a Levi Strauss heir and former nonprofit executive who has courted the city’s tech and finance elite to secure funding for public projects, such as a monthly downtown block party backed by crypto billionaire Chris Larsen.
California Forever
A former journalist who was knighted in 2013 in his native United Kingdom, Moritz’s influence on San Francisco has been extensive. The Welsh billionaire co-founded the San Francisco Standard, a local news outlet, and has created a civic engagement group and contributed millions of dollars to local campaigns and ballot measures. He’s also invested in California Forever, a tech-billionaire backed group hoping to build an industrial city from scratch on the edge of the Bay Area.
Boundless San Francisco is being done in conjunction with Lever for Change, a nonprofit that reports having awarded more than $2.6 billion to more than 500 organizations. The group has organized regionally-focused competitions before, awarding projects aimed at revitalizing Chicago’s South Side and improving mental health outcomes in Texas.
Registration for Boundless San Francisco closes on Sept. 11 and completed applications are due by Oct. 9.
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