Seed
Capacity Building: Investing in the vision of Central Valley communities to guide initiatives and infrastructure that have the potential for long-term sustainability.
Seed stabilized the organizations. Cultivate builds the infrastructure.
Grow transfers the future.
Seed (2023-2025) laid the foundation for everything that follows.
During JBMF’s Seed era, JBMF invested over $25 million in 90+ Central Valley organizations and leveraged an additional $13 million from aligned funders through direct fundraising and partner aligned efforts. On the heels of the global pandemic, these investments gave leaders time, safety, and the space to think beyond the next crisis. They recognized that people are infrastructure and that investing in local leaders can give rise to infrastructure. Partners used Seed to do just that: strengthen teams, build internal systems, deepen relationships, build narrative power, harness civic imagination, and begin forming the connective field that now exists across journalism, multilingual learners, districts, nonprofit leadership, and civic engagement. What began as capacity building work has become a region-wide center for collaboration, narrative power, and civic imagination.
Seed’s power was not in any single grant, but from the shared conditions it created:
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Time to plan, not react
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Room to imagine beyond one year
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Stability for emerging leaders
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Early cross-county and cross-sector relationships
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A shift from isolated efforts to collective possibility
How We Got Here:
Central Valley organizations were navigating a period of profound transition. The COVID-19 pandemic required communities to cultivate new ways of working, thinking, and collaborating, all while an unpredictable funding landscape expanded in some areas and contracted in others. At the same time, the renewed movement for racial justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd underscored both the importance of solidarity and the deep need for lasting systems change. Communities were responding to immediate needs while imagining new possibilities for equity, civic participation, and shared leadership. Rather than viewing these conditions as temporary challenges, partners revealed long-term needs that called for an approach grounded in relationships, trust, and the leadership already present across the Central Valley.
Through conversations with community leaders, educators, journalists, and nonprofit partners, we listened before we designed. Together, we defined what meaningful partnership should look like: shared mission and values, reciprocal relationships, flexible support, and investment in organizational capacity alongside community impact. Those conversations shaped an adaptive strategy designed to evolve alongside the region while remaining rooted in the people and organizations building a stronger Central Valley. By investing first in relationships, infrastructure, and long-term capacity, the Seed phase laid the foundation for a resilient ecosystem prepared to navigate change for years to come.
Throughout Seed, our partners collectively:
- Sustained or established 50+ journalism roles
- Increased bilingual coverage
- Increased parent participation in multilingual learner classrooms through parent ambassador programs
- Sustained work in 80% of the 9 core districts and advanced sustainability efforts across 70 districts through policy and narrative change work
- Stabilized and grew organizations such as CBDIO and Breakbox
- Established an English Learner Reporting Lab
- Raised or secured $13 million in matching funds for the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative
- Formed the Central Valley Multilingual Consortium and policy agenda
- Leveraged $4 million in public funding through the Emerging Bilingual Collaborative
- Built organizational capacity through pilot grants with Pitaya, YLI, and YDN
But stabilization is not the end goal. Even the strongest organizations remain vulnerable in a landscape of unpredictable public funding, federal clawbacks, and fluctuating philanthropic attention. The Valley’s leaders are ready to imagine what comes next, and the moment demands it.
As a foundation team, we grounded into our values in grantmaking: Human-Centered Grantmaking. It’s a co-creative process that focuses on moving beyond transactional funding relationships and toward practices rooted in abundance, co-creation, and empathy.