Bill Somerville’s Lifetime Achievement Award
By Andrea Smith, PVF Program and Communications Associate
PVF’s Founder Bill Somerville was recognized among this year’s National Philanthropy Day 2025 awardees for his leadership and impact, and we were honored to attend and accept the award on his behalf.
Bill Somerville has been active in philanthropy for over 60 years. As a graduate of UC Berkeley majoring in Criminology, he recognized injustices early on, left the family printing business, and dedicated his life to improving the lives of the poor and disenfranchised and building community. Among Bill’s first leadership roles in the 1970s was as Executive Director of the San Mateo Community Foundation, now the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, where he served for 17 years. His motto was “find people doing outstanding non-profit work and fund them.” He brought this ideology to Philanthropic Ventures Foundation (PVF), a public charity that he founded in 1991. At PVF, Bill focused on “venture philanthropy,” a term he coined to describe quick response, high-impact grantmaking. At the helm, Bill was out and about meeting people, rarely behind a desk, identifying emerging leaders with high potential and passionate ideas. He believes in people and supports those doing excellent work by empowering them, finding donors to meet their needs, and giving them capacity to carry out their mission.
In the 1990s, Bill created a variety of “immediate response grants” in which teachers and social workers – those working “in the trenches” – could access small grants to support their work in the classroom or with foster care youth with a check issued and sent within 48 hours. He created funding programs for family law judges and high school principals to access discretionary funding to support those in need. He witnessed how critical timing was in preventing a situation from becoming a crisis.
To build the philanthropic sector, Bill strived to expose and encourage new leaders to the field. As a member of Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service he established the Tom Ford Fellowship Program, placing graduating Stanford students at a foundation for a year-long fellowship and supporting them through a stipend.
24 years later, the Fellowships are still going strong. In 2004, Bill created the Parent Involvement Worker Program, placing English as a Second Language (ESL) graduates as bilingual workers in East Palo Alto classrooms to improve communication between parents and teachers and facilitate parents’ involvement in the schools.
Bill tested new approaches to creative grantmaking through PVF, serving as a demonstration foundation for others. His ideas and approach caught on. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation funded Bill to share his innovative grantmaking with other community and private foundations. As a result, Bill travelled and taught at over 400 foundations throughout the United States over 15 years. Bill commemorated his approach in his book, Grassroots Philanthropy: Fieldnotes of a Maverick Grantmaker, co-authored with Fred Setterberg.
“With no agenda other than his need to set things right in the world, Somerville lays out a series of principles that can be adopted by both endowed national foundations and those with lesser means, providing they have an urge to use their wealth to improve the world. In Somerville, I found a risk-taking, venture philanthropist fused with a roll-up-his-sleeves social worker. The mixture is a philanthropic force of nature.” – Sean Stannard-Stockton (President and Chief Investment Officer of Ensemble/Corient)
Bill continues to be active in philanthropy today. Retiring as Founder and President of PVF in 2023, he remains a member of the PVF Board of Directors.
