Sandler Foundation donations made to ProPublica

This is an online portal with information on donations that were announced publicly (or have been shared with permission) that were of interest to Vipul Naik. The git repository with the code for this portal, as well as all the underlying data, is available on GitHub. All payment amounts are in current United States dollars (USD). The repository of donations is being seeded with an initial collation by Issa Rice as well as continued contributions from him (see his commits and the contract work page listing all financially compensated contributions to the site) but all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies belongs to Vipul Naik. Current data is preliminary and has not been completely vetted and normalized; if sharing a link to this site or any page on this site, please include the caveat that the data is preliminary (if you want to share without including caveats, please check with Vipul Naik). We expect to have completed the first round of development by the end of July 2024. See the about page for more details. Also of interest: pageview data on analytics.vipulnaik.com, tutorial in README, request for feedback to EA Forum.

Table of contents

Basic donor information

We do not have any donor information for the donor Sandler Foundation in our system.

Full donor page for donor Sandler Foundation

Basic donee information

We do not have any donee information for the donee ProPublica in our system.

Full donee page for donee ProPublica

Donor–donee relationship

Item Value

Donor–donee donation statistics

Cause areaCountMedianMeanMinimum10th percentile 20th percentile 30th percentile 40th percentile 50th percentile 60th percentile 70th percentile 80th percentile 90th percentile Maximum
Overall 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Donation amounts by cause area and year

If you hover over a cell for a given cause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.

Note: Cause area classification used here may not match that used by donor for all cases.

Cause area Number of donations Total
(filter this donor) 1 0.00
Total 1 0.00

Skipping spending graph as there is at most one year’s worth of donations.

Full list of documents in reverse chronological order (3 documents)

Title (URL linked)Publication dateAuthorPublisherAffected donorsAffected doneesAffected influencersDocument scopeCause areaNotes
Thoughts on the Sandler Foundation2015-02-24Holden Karnofsky Open PhilanthropySandler Foundation Open Philanthropy Center for American Progress ProPublica Center for Responsible Lending Washington Center for Equitable Growth Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Third-party coverage of donor strategyThis blog post originally appeared on the GiveWell blog at https://blog.givewell.org/2015/02/24/thoughts-on-the-sandler-foundation/ prior to the Open Phil blog launch. The post is part of Open Phil research into how different foundations structure their operations and giving. The post covers the Sandler Foundation, which has an unusual giving model, sacrificing cause-specific, domain-expert "program officers" and instead having a small staff that would opportunistically shift between researching different giving opportunities. Successes of the Sandler Foundation were noted, including forming the Center for American Progress, ProPublica, Center for Responsible Lending, and Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and providing support to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The Sandler Foundation approach was described as follows: (1) The priority placed on funding strong leadership, (2) A high level of “opportunism”: being ready to put major funding or no funding behind an idea, depending on the quality of the specific opportunity. Ultimately, the post concluded that Open Phil would probably stick with the more standard program officer model and including a mix of larger and smaller grants. Reasons given were: (a) Open Phil's policy priorities mapped less clearly to existing political platforms than the Sandler Foundation's, so it would be harder to find fully aligned leaders, (b) Open Phil sees a good deal of value in relatively small, low-confidence, low-due-diligence grants that give a person/team a chance to “get an idea off the ground.” We’ve made multiple such grants to date and we plan on continuing to do so, (c) confidence in the Sandler Foundation's track record was not very high. However, Open Phil might experiment with using generalist staff in addition to program officers; the generalists would scan across issues to find and vet opportunities
The Sandler Way: Where Big Philanthropy Meets the Art of Common Sense2015-01-27David Callahan Inside PhilanthropySandler Foundation American Civil Liberties Union ProPublica Center for Responsible Lending American Asthma Foundation University of California, San Francisco Center for American Progress Human Rights Watch Stanford University Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Third-party coverage of donor strategyThe Inside Philanthropy article discusses the giving strategy of the Sandler Foundation, backed by the wealth of Herb and Marion Sandler that they made by growing and then selling the Golden West Financial Corporation. The article identifies a few key principles of the foundation's giving: (1) focus money where it can make a big difference (in many cases, this leads to the creation of new nonprofits), (2) look for leverage points (i.e., look for cases where spending some money can lead to more resoures from others being allocated and greater long-term results), (3) obsess over due diligence, (4) back great leaders, (5) provide long term general support (in contrast to support tied to a specific program area)
Self-Made Philanthropists2008-03-09Joe Nocera New York TimesSandler Foundation Human Rights Watch American Civil Liberties Union Acorn Center for Responsible Lending Center for American Progress ProPublica University of California, San Francisco Third-party coverage of donor strategyThe New York Times Magazine article discusses the giving of couple Herb and Marion Sandler, who made a fortune off of Golden West Financial Corporation, a savings and loan operation in California. The couple began their giving in the 1980s, first as individual donors and then through the Sandler Foundation which they created. Key distinguishing features of the foundation, as highlighted in the article include: a "philanthrocapitalist" approach that relies on extensive vetting of nonprofits before making long, multi-year commitments to them, financing the creation of new nonprofits if necessary, and close engagement with grantees

Full list of donations in reverse chronological order (1 donations)

Graph of all donations (with known year of donation), showing the timeframe of donations

Graph of donations and their timeframes
Amount (current USD)Amount rank (out of 1)Donation dateCause areaURLInfluencerNotes
----2019--https://www.sandlerfoundation.org/grants/--