Voices of the Community

Tipping Point Community

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Episode notes

“How do we pull all those resources and really make poverty something that is, solvable here in the Bay area” – Kelly Bathgate

In this episode, we feature the voices of Kelly Bathgate the Chief Program Officer and Marisa Giller the Communications Director at Tipping Point Community. Tipping Point Community was founded by Daniel Lurie back in 2005 with a systemic approach to ending the cycle of poverty for over one plus millions of our fellow community members in the San Francisco Bay Area. Tipping Point’s model is different from a traditional philanthropic organization or a foundation. Tipping Point sits right in the middle between incredible wealth and incredible poverty. Their board of directors covers their overhead, they utilize all of their funding to have 100 percent impact, they have no endowment and every year they start at zero and raise millions of dollars to fund nonprofits in their four key issues that Kelly and Marisa will walk us through today. 

Marisa mentioned the Taking Count Study on poverty in the San Francisco Bay Area by sociologists and political scientists from UC Berkeley, the Othering & Belonging Institute and Tipping Point Community. The Taking Count Study was a panel survey conducted between 2018 and 2019 prior to the Covid-19 pandemic’s historic impact on the bay area. The study was published in May of 2020 

Here are some of the findings from the study

Of the 7.75 Million people in the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area 17% of the residents are living in poverty

1 in 2 households cannot pay all of their bills over the course of a year

Thirty Percent of households went without essentials such as food, shelter and medicine because they could not afford them

Four out of Ten Bay Area families did not have savings to cover three months of expenses and one in five have less than Four Hundred dollars for an emergency

To find out more and get engaged in Tipping Point’s four key issues of housing, early childhood and employment and how they’re working with nonprofits, corporations and philanthropy to solve poverty for our fellow community members please go to tipping point dot org