By Clay Lambert
When the David and Lucile Packard Foundation announced last month that it would cut costs and scale back donations, the numbers were almost too large to grasp. The Los Altos-based philanthropy - one of the nation’s largest - said it plans to curtail giving by 20 percent, down to a still mind-boggling $200 million in 2003. The plummet in Hewlett-Packard stock value is largely responsible for the painful belt-tightening.
Leo Florendo is too busy to worry about that. The faculty advisor for the Los Altos High School Robotics Team has his hands full with 20 teen-age dreamers who benefited from a $10,000 Packard Foundation grant this year.
“The Packard Foundation is a huge part of what makes us successful,” Florendo said. “Without them we wouldn’t have achieved a national championship in animation.”
Florendo is not the only one in Los Altos who becomes animated at the mention of cutbacks at the Packard Foundation. While Stanford University will survive without some of the millions of dollars funneled annually from the foundation, the prospects are murkier for dozens of local groups, such as the Los Altos-based Peninsula Symphony.
The Packard Foundation’s $50,000 commitment in 2002 made it the largest single contributor to the symphony’s $380,000 budget. Symphony Executive Director Margrit Rinderknecht has asked for $38,000 next year and realizes she may have to make do with less. She shudders at the thought of coming away empty-handed.
“We would be forced to rethink our performance schedule,” she said.
Young robotic engineers and older music fans can take heart, however, from a letter Packard Foundation sent to area grant recipients along with word of the cutbacks. Rinderknecht said the letter and calls to the program officer handling the symphony account made clear a continuing commitment to the foundation’s home turf.
Foundation Communication Director Chris DeCardy added that the board maintains a special fondness for Santa Clara, San Mateo, Monterey and Santa Cruz counties and vowed that would continue. Structural changes include focusing six program areas into three. Gone are the Philanthropy and Organizational Effectiveness departments. Conservation and Science will be combined alongside continuing work with children, families and community and population initiatives.
The cost cutting began at home. DeCardy reiterated that the organization will leave rented space and consolidate a work force that could be slashed in half into buildings it owns at 175 San Antonio Road and 300 Second St. When those moves will take place remains uncertain. The board may decide when it meets behind closed doors Dec. 5 and 6.
Until then, local organizations are left to ponder what life would be like without the generous, consistent support of the Packard Foundation. The most sophisticated among them have known this day could come.
“You always want to be cultivating funding,” said Cheryl Hylton, associate director of the Foothill-De Anza Community College Foundation, which has 350 different educational funds to manage - several with ties to the Packard Foundation. “It would be a mistake to ever take anything for granted.”
Rinderknecht never took the foundation for granted, but she had grown accustomed to the support.
“Perhaps we were too content,” she said.
