As 18-year-old Margaret Gomez was about to complete her final GED exam, she started having contractions. She rushed from the room before finishing, though would go on to reschedule and pass. In May 2006, Gomez spoke at graduation to her 50-person class. Her 2-year-old daughter, Julyza, and weeks-old son, Junior, were in the crowd.

Samuel Lauderdale grew up as the youngest of three brothers in a single-mother, low-income household. He was always a good student, until high school was on the horizon. He started hanging out with kids that sold drugs and got bad grades, and says he “wasn’t necessarily getting in trouble,” but would “fight a lot.”

B Street has built a community of almost 30,000 devoted subscribers and patrons, and has dedicated itself to producing more than 100 new plays — 60 of which are world, national or regional premieres. Yet despite its successes, we at B Street have never lost sight of our original mission to entertain and educate children about theater and playwriting.

Community foundations have a long tradition of helping to bring about thoughtful, effective change. As 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charities, they enable people to easily and effectively support the issues they care about, including education, youth, arts, social services, environment, recreation, public health and more.

When an earthquake struck Napa Valley in August 2014, destroying homes and businesses, injuring 200 people and killing one, residents rallied to support their neighbors, donating almost $11 million to the Napa Valley Community Foundation.

The Sacramento Blue Star Moms provide support to mothers with children in the military, ship care packages to deployed service members, support veteran organizations, promote patriotism, and remember our fallen and support their family members.

We are Families NOW. That’s Families NOW, not tomorrow, not next week. We remove the systemic barriers that cause our children to languish in foster care. We show up, and we speak up at the tables where child welfare policies and funding decisions are made, and in the halls where legislation is passed.

When you really think about it, what are the two pieces of finance that can impact someone the hardest? The answer, we think, is budgeting and credit.

So why is it that we don’t learn about these topics in school?  

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. I was on the phone with my dad; we were witnessing history together. Not since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the bill that would eventually become Medicare and Medicaid had we experienced such a monumental healthcare shift.

During the school year, 13 students from Washington Elementary School in Stockton, meet once a week at the 5.7-acre Boggs Tract Community Farm, where the children grow seedlings into vegetables in one small patch of land.

In providing more than shelter, we are cognizant that we are not just helping animals, but also helping people who love animals. That requires us to be as compassionate, caring and patient with people as we are with animals.

Without their owners, some domestic animals may be able to survive in a new humanless environment, but for others the situation is much more bleak.

Visitors to the museum hear personal stories of internment at the permanent exhibit Uprooted! Japanese Americans During WWII.

Oftentimes, the most fiscally-successful companies of today are those that have embraced a culture of giving back to the community that helped them grow, encouraging their employees to do the same. But the first hurdle is deciding what form of philanthropy to support.

Nonprofits have a tremendous impact on our state and our community. They represent more than $34 billion in assets and $1.5 billion in annual revenue. The nonprofit sector needs to be recognized as a major economic participant to our region.

This story starts back in 1922.

That’s the year when a small group of Sacramento-based doctors combined their professional connections and their Rotary Club memberships to form a program that is now the longest-running Rotary fundraiser in the country.

Dee Lucien is waiting patiently. She’s on the shortlist for a spot in the prestigious doctoral program at UC Davis’ Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing, thanks to a full-ride scholarship she says she never would have known about if it hadn’t been for one local nonprofit.

Those who have seen past California Musical Theatre productions of Beauty and the Beast were in for a treat this year: The “tale as old as time” is decidedly new and improved thanks to a recent influx of grant money from the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission.

Katie McCleary and 916 Ink co-founder Michael Spurgeon knew they wanted to start a creative nonprofit for children when they met at a writer’s conference in 2010. They believed Sacramento could support such a program because there was already a strong writing community here, nurtured by programs like the Sacramento Poetry Center, but there was a glaring, missing piece in Sacramento’s creative writing community — a youth program.

In order for spawning Chinook salmon to return to Deer Creek this autumn, they first had to swim against the stream from the San Joaquin River to the Mokelumne River, east of Rio Vista. Then, the determined fish had to make their way up to where the Mokelumne meets the Cosumnes River, and finally, migrate several miles more to get to the shady shores of Deer Creek.