How the Prebys Foundation is taking on some of San Diego's biggest civic issues
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Grant Oliphant addressing the crowd at the Prebys Foundation's inaugural Waves Festival. Photo: Edgar Ontiveros Medina/Prebys Foundation
It bought a distressed downtown high-rise, paid for a blueprint to redevelop the Civic Center, donated $2 million to boost local journalism and invested in public health research on the Tijuana River sewage crisis.
The big picture: The Prebys Foundation has its hands in some of the biggest civic issues facing San Diego.
Why it matters: With $1.12 billion at its disposal, Prebys is San Diego's largest private foundation and just a few years into its existence, it's acting like it.
Catch up quick: The foundation hired CEO Grant Oliphant in 2022, released a strategic vision in 2023, and established itself as a player in San Diego's ongoing quest to act like a big city.
Between the lines: But it had an inauspicious launch, when the estate of Conrad Prebys in 2021 sold its 6,000-apartment portfolio to Blackstone Inc. for over $1 billion.
- That gave the foundation the nest egg it's now tapping for impactful investments, but it alarmed housing activists who foresaw Blackstone hiking rents on those naturally affordable units.
Friction point: New tenants in those buildings paid on average 29% to 100% more in rent than tenants paid in 2021, a 2023 CalMatters investigation found.
By the numbers: The foundation issued $57 million in grants in 2023, and another $55 million in 2024, focused on health care, arts, youth success and medical research.
- It also made $100 million available for impact investing, including launching a $50 million venture fund for life sciences companies.
What they're saying: "The central role a foundation like ours can play is changing the narrative of the place, to allow it to aim higher and to not let itself off the hook when there are important things to be done, just because they're hard," Oliphant told Axios.
Zoom in: Among Prebys' donations so far is nearly $1 million for research and advocacy at the Tijuana River, $2 million for five journalism nonprofits, and nearly $600,000 for Civic Center planning, with another $250,000 expected to be awarded this summer.
- It also spent $40 million to buy Wells Fargo Plaza, the high rise at 401 B Street.
Case in point: That gave Prebys skin in the game on the B Street corridor, which Oliphant called a victim of blight caused by the Civic Center, which it's also trying to reinvent.
- He said they can "help our downtown answer a question every downtown in America is struggling with: What is a downtown for in the wake of COVID and remote work?"
What we're watching: Oliphant said philanthropy has not been as central in San Diego as it is elsewhere — like Pittsburgh, where he came from — because it's younger, and residents often have roots elsewhere,
- "We're at an inflection point, both because of this foundation and our model of using our resource in multitudinous ways, and because there's a generational transfer coming, that inevitably will involve wealth going from individuals to institutions," he said,
- "We're beginning to see the maturation of philanthropy in San Diego."