Mr. Green Goes to Sacramento

Local Nonprofit Lion Moves to the Heart of Service

Geoff Green smiles a lot in conversation, and he’s smiling now. This is not the tactical smile produced through gnashed teeth (you know the one), but a genuine show of pleasure in the moment. This can be disorienting to the part-time social cynic. Or so I’ve been told. Green’s broad grin these days is likely to do with his pending move to the swirling galactic center of the beloved and complex nonprofit mission to which he’s energetically devoted his professional life. As of January 2024, Green will be CEO of CalNonprofits; a statewide member org that wants to empower California nonprofits – thus their beneficiaries – by actualizing the power bloc the state’s disparate nonprofits comprise; if they could just join hands, so to speak. What would come of consolidating this scattered, would-be power bloc? “We could step forward and lead more, rather than always reacting.” 

For the past 10 years Green has already been serving his new employer in various volunteer capacities, including board chair, treasurer, and a seat on the policy committee. He even had a hand in the creation of the California Assembly Select Committee for Nonprofits. Proactive vs. Reactive remains a keynote in Green’s nonprofit M.O. His most potent iteration of that philosophy may well be his having led – as CEO of the SBCC Foundation – the momentous 2016 rollout of the aptly-named SBCC Promise. To date, that initiative has seen some 6,500 local high school grads partake of a cost-free two years of higher ed their circumstances might otherwise have made impossible. Can there be a more powerful mission than throwing light and water at a sunflower? More prosaically – how many people in this world ring down the final curtain never having unlocked themselves? TheSBCC Promise is a terrific example – both of transfiguring public beneficence into changed individual lives, and of Green’s preference for action over reaction. His imminent departure from SBCC Foundation after nearly nine game-changing years is big news – and throws a helpful light on the deeper nonprofit “brand.” Green is all over it.

“We (nonprofits) are often thought of as the nice people, the helpers,” Green says. “We’re the ones who step in to make things better when there’s a crisis. That’s all true. But we’re also an incredibly powerful economic sector in California. At last count, one out of every 14 jobs in the state were in a nonprofit organization – 15 percent of our gross state product was in the nonprofit sector. Put us all together, we’re the second or third largest employer in the state.” Putting them all together is but one of the aims of CalNonprofits, whose tireless nonprofit advocacies make them regulars in the halls of the CA State Assembly in Sacramento. 

Most recently, CalNonprofits worked with an alliance of California nonprofits to craft seven Assembly bills collectively addressing a little-known nonprofit role – contractor to the State of California. The California Nonprofit Equity Initiative is designed to fix some of the deets of this sometimes-bumpy relationship. “This may be the first time, I think in California nonprofit history, that we really advanced a whole package of bills through the legislature,” Green says. “And I was proud as a Santa Barbarian to see that the two that got to the governor’s desk were authored by our two representatives, one by Senator Limón and the other by Senator Assemblyman Hart.”

In fact, Gregg Hart’s musically named AB 590 has already been signed by Governor Newsom, ensuring nonprofits receive up to 25 percent of their contracted funds up front. The fiduciary leanness of the nonprofit has long been at odds with the State’s bureaucratic slow pokiness (not a real phrase) in paying for contracted work. “It happens a lot where entities have to self-fund on the front end and wait for the reimbursement much later,” Green says. “One organization actually had to borrow tens of thousands of dollars and use debt to fund the contract work until the state came and paid.”

Green has long enjoyed a regional reputation as the genial (and unofficial) Arm-Twister-in-Chief where fence-sitting donors are concerned and is the face of the complex nonprofit mission here. How does someone ascend to the arguable center of the nonprofit universe the way Geoff Green has? In his case the journey began with – you guessed it – a stint as a Park Ranger/Naturalist at Yosemite. Since graduating with a UCSB degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, that inaugural gig on Green’s CV stands out as the one most aligned with his hard-won diploma. Apparently, the runway is sufficiently long that we can each change tack as evolving passions dictate (kids, take note). When Green left Yosemite after four years, he pivoted to the Santa Barbara Fund for 17 years, before landing at SBCC. The interviewer personally wonders if it was Yosemite’s ill-mannered Black Bear community or Green’s fear of heights that inspired his full flight into – and public mastery of – the nonprofit world. Pure speculation, of course. “I absolutely own that,” Green says. “I am … the kind word is a ‘Renaissance person’ – the not-so-kind is ‘really unfocused.’” A third candidate is “insatiably curious.” His manifold, restless achievements as SBCC Foundation CEO – including the largest gift ever made to the school – suggest he is plenty focused, and his move to CalNonprofits puts this “lifelong learner” right in the middle of the fascinating, and crucial, nonprofit maelstrom. 

A favorite Geoff Green talking (and doing) point is the nonprofit as avatar of bottom-up societal betterment, and public policy that helps smooth that approach. This challenges the broad-brush conventional wisdom, never fully articulated, of the nonprofit as a well-intentioned but childlike enterprise pretending to be a business and peopled by kind-hearted volunteers in timeworn cardigans whose “day jobs” are elsewhere. As CEO of the SBCC Foundation, Green has been an amused recipient of this read. “In this role I’ve been asked by very smart, educated, lovely people in the community. ‘So what do you do? What’s your actual day job?’ As though being the CEO of the SBCC Foundation is my volunteer work on the side.” The Geoff Green smile is huge on this one. “These questions are coming from a good place,” he laughs, “but they just have no sense that, well, I’m actually running an $85 million business. This is my day job.”