After eight years at the helm, Sarah Hobson is stepping down from her post as executive director of the West Marin Fund, a nonprofit she shepherded from a fledgling foundation into a mainstay of regional giving and collaboration.
“I’ve had a wonderful time working with the fund, and I feel good about the progress that we’ve made,” Ms. Hobson said. “I’ll miss the work and the people, but I will still live in the community, so it’s not as if I’m disappearing.”
She will leave the fund at the end of the year and is working with an interim director while the board searches for a permanent replacement.
Under Ms. Hobson’s leadership, the West Marin Fund has increased its budget and staffing by more than 500 percent. In 2016, the year before she came aboard, it dispensed $126,000 in grants. Last year, it dispensed $1.7 million. Its reach extends across the region in myriad ways, supporting everything from early childhood education and affordable housing to the arts and environmental initiatives.
Ms. Hobson came from leadership roles at several international development organizations and foundations, most of them focused on supporting rural women in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world.
The fund’s own roots trace back to the Marin Community Foundation’s sharp reduction in grant-making to West Marin in the wake of a strategic planning review. The West Marin Fund began in 2011 with no funding whatsoever—an unusual start for a foundation—and was launched under the leadership of a part-time executive director.
Ms. Hobson, 78, was the first to take on the role full time. She quickly established herself as a committed advocate and collaborator, working closely with dozens of West Marin nonprofits to serve a patchwork of unincorporated coastal communities with pressing social needs but no elected government bodies to represent them.
“She was absolutely the right person at the critical moment,” said Harriet Moss, a Stinson Beach resident who served as chair of the fund’s board through nearly all of Ms. Hobson’s tenure. “We were so lucky. She had a deep knowledge of philanthropy, a deep knowledge of rural economies, and she had done development work around the world. She came in with a vision of what a rural community foundation could be.”
When Ms. Hobson came aboard, some in the local nonprofit community feared the fund would compete with them, drawing money from donors that might otherwise come their way. But Ms. Hobson assuaged such concerns with an emphasis on collaboration that quickly won support from grant recipients and donors alike.
“She has brought the county, the Marin Community Foundation and other foundations in to work on West Marin issues in a way that’s never been done before,” Ms. Moss said. “It really couldn’t be done before because there was no central sort of catalyst to make that happen. That’s what the West Marin Fund has become.”
From the beginning, the fund has sought to unite the leaders of the coast’s many small nonprofits, and Ms. Hobson has continued efforts to coordinate their work. The fund sponsors regular trainings and networking mixers for nonprofit leaders, and it hosts monthly meetings of the West Marin Collaborative, where advocates update one another, mingle and brainstorm.
“She just has an ability to bring people and organizations together, and it leads to very meaningful collaborations,” said Cristina Salcedo, the family advocate at the Tomales and Bodega Bay Elementary Schools. “At the collaborative, her voice was always heard.”
Ms. Hobson helmed a West Marin workforce housing committee whose mission became especially critical last year after the settlement of a legal battle that will end most ranching in the Point Reyes National Seashore. Ranch residents, many of whom work in town, must vacate their homes by March 1.
In addition to some 100 people displaced from the seashore, another 40 face the prospect of losing housing at the Martinelli Ranch, just north of Point Reyes Station, where the county has declared the housing unfit for human habitation.
The Community Land Trust Association of West Marin is leading the effort to locate and build housing for the displaced residents, who are the backbone of West Marin’s workforce. But behind the scenes, Ms. Hobson has played a major fundraising role, securing $9 million in commitments from her donor network, which in turn brought in another $4 million through the Marin Community Foundation, roughly half CLAM’s target. While much of that money has been pledged directly to the fund, Ms. Hobson steered the largest donation—$6 million—directly to CLAM.
“We partner very, very closely with all the nonprofits,” Ms. Hobson said. “We don’t want to rival them. We don’t want to take money away from them. We want to bring new money, or extra money, into West Marin.”
Ms. Hobson, who was born and raised in England, has many qualities that make her an especially adept fundraiser, according to Steve Costa, the former owner of Point Reyes Books and co-founder of the fund.
“The accent helps,” said Mr. Costa, who worked as an East Bay community organizer before moving to West Marin. “There’s a certain presence that Sarah has. She’s very kind, and she’s very open. There’s an aura to her that immediately makes people trust what she’s saying and feel confident that whatever resources they share will be invested in the best possible way.”
While many people dread fundraising, Ms. Hobson enjoys it. The key, she said, is having passion for your mission. That passion must be contagious.
“She leads by enthusiasm, and that’s a very important trait,” said David Kirp, an Inverness resident and West Marin Fund donor who has worked closely with Ms. Hobson on early childhood education issues. “The secret to raising money isn’t that you drag people to the bank with a gun to their head, forcing them to write a check. It’s supposed to be happy money. It’s supposed to make them feel good, and she’s great at that.”
Those who have benefited from the fund’s largesse praise Ms. Hobson for being a good listener and placing a premium on equity.
“More than anything, she elevates community voices,” said Ms. Salcedo, who works closely with the families of Latino students, who make up more than half the population at Shoreline Unified schools. “She’s been a champion for the community. She’s always putting our families at the forefront.”
Her support was especially valuable during the pandemic, Ms. Salcedo said.
“A lot of families needed financial support just to get through,” she said. “She came right away and asked, ‘How can we help? What can we do? What do you need?’ The first thing we saw was, we’re being heard. Our needs are being met.”
Mr. Kirp described Ms. Hobson as a “quiet revolutionary” in a staid, mostly white and affluent community.
“She brings a worldly, cosmopolitan background to this quiet corner of the universe,” he said. “She combines ferocious intelligence with this incredible warmth. It’s a very special combination.”
Although she doesn’t like black tea, Ms. Hobson is in some ways quintessentially British. She apologizes a lot, and she’s modest—rarely mentioning some of the more colorful aspects of her background.
At 17, Ms. Hobson ventured off to the West Bank, where she lived in a Russian Orthodox convent and taught English to Palestinian orphans. At 19, she traveled solo in Kenya and Zimbabwe for a year and a half. At 23, she made a trip to Iran and roamed the country disguised as a boy. Three years later, she spent six months living with a sprawling farm family in rural India. And at 31, she spent three months in Iran at the height the revolution and the ensuing 1979 hostage crisis.
She wrote books and made documentaries about the sojourns to Iran and India, and she worked on a TV series about Iran with David Frost, the British television host famed for interviewing eight British prime ministers and disgraced U.S. president Richard Nixon.
Ms. Hobson’s father traveled in lofty political circles himself. He served as attorney general in the government of one conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, and won the parliamentary seat of another, Anthony Eden.
Thanks to her British discretion, many of her West Marin friends know nothing about this. “I’m proud that I’ve made my own way,” Ms. Hobson said. “I’ve never ever used my father’s name to get work or to do anything. I’ve forged my own path.”
When she leaves the fund, that path will take her back to England for several months, where she plans to spend time with family and continue working as a consultant to international development organizations. She has already lined up a consulting gig with the Louis-Dreyfus Foundation, a French nonprofit that supports agricultural innovation in developing nations across the Global South.
In that role, she will spend more time in India, where her previous experience defined a career whose through line has been uplifting rural communities, with a focus on their most vulnerable members.
“That was really the formative moment for me,” she said. “I realized this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
The Point Reyes Light is a weekly newspaper serving western Marin County since 1948. They are a family-owned and operated business dedicated to village journalism and community resilience. On their website you will find most of the content published in the print edition, plus a link to their biannual travel journal, the North Coaster. We hope you enjoy our work as much as we do.
