The Parker Foundation Celebrates Over 50 Years of Giving
San Diego is blessed with a temperate climate, stunning landscapes, and abundant recreational spaces. It has also been enriched by the vision of Gerald T. and Inez Grant Parker, who founded The Parker Foundation in 1971. Established to improve quality of life throughout San Diego County, the Foundation supports a broad range of charitable organizations serving the region.
As one of San Diego’s most generous grantmakers, The Parker Foundation has awarded more than $66 million in grants, playing a vital role in strengthening the local nonprofit community. Since its founding with $4 million in assets in 1971, the Foundation has grown steadily and now manages assets exceeding $48 million. Read More >
For years, the Parker Foundation has been a philanthropic leader in the effort to reduce homelessness in San Diego.
From leading the Homelessness Working Group at Catalyst of San Diego & Imperial Counties (formerly San Diego Grantmakers), to helping to found Funders Together to End Homelessness San Diego (Funders Together) and serving in board positions, Parker’s leaders have poured countless hours of service and dedication into reducing homelessness, and have been visionary in recognizing that change is most effective and long-lasting when they invest at the systems level. At Funders Together, we work to make the homeless crisis response system work more efficiently to move people experiencing homelessness from the streets into permanent housing with support services as needed to keep people housed. With the leadership of the Parker Foundation, we’re working to make homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring.
Amy Denhart – Director, Funders Together to End Homelessness San Diego
The Parker Foundation has been an important supporter of the Elementary Institute of Science (EIS) since 1998. In fact, the Foundation was a major contributor to the campaign that built our beautiful facility here in southeastern San Diego where we have provided hands-on science instruction to thousands of students from low-income families. We have enjoyed our relationship with the Parker Foundation because we feel they place great trust in the organizations they fund and rely on us to know what is most needed in the community we serve. Over the past two decades, the Parker Foundation has supported a variety of needs ranging from helping with our building campaign, to most recently providing funds that sustain key science education programs for underserved students during and after the shutdown created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jim Stone – Executive Director, Elementary Institute of Science
Some of Our Past Grantees
