Placer Community Foundation

Our Roots Reach Back Over 70 Years

Our history reaches back over 70 years to when the Auburn Community Foundation was created in 1948 as a private foundation by the caring, forward-looking Beecher family. But the story of Placer Community Foundation starts in 2005, when a few visionary residents from among our county’s communities did something brilliant for all of us. They imagined something that hadn’t been here before — a public foundation belonging to everyone, where generous people could go to get expert support and hear creative ideas that would help them to amplify and achieve their charitable intentions.

They pictured a prudently managed organization overseen by a diverse board of civic leaders, where donations could be invested together to grow, where anyone could become a donor, and where donors became true philanthropists—able over time to grant out even more than they had put in, and able at any moment to call on a team of professionals with a knowledge of the community’s needs and resources that truly runs deep.

Their idea was, and is, your Placer Community Foundation. The secure, well-managed public resource they envisioned is now a multi-million dollar consortium of funds and, with your help, in a relatively short time the Foundation has grown so it can be deployed to tackle our region’s most urgent challenges and seize promising opportunities to improve lives throughout Placer County and beyond.

Building Community

Donors at PCF have organized their philanthropy to help their fellow community members. Whether it be to provide fresh food and produce to our hungry, teaching our young people to read, providing computers to foster youth, expanding arts programming or protecting animals and our wild and scenic areas, donors at PCF make an impact.

Placer Community Foundation is a public institution that prepares us for the future instead of borrowing against it. We celebrate the foresight of the generous people who came before us, and are all around us, still contributing, still imagining. As a part of PCF, your example inspires every one of us to think about the needs of our neighbors and be good stewards of our community, and for those who will come next.

2015 25 youth ages 8-12 from Excel Roseville got to be engineers for the day at the Hacker Lab Sierra College in Rocklin.

2016  PCF creates Placer Housing Matters, a project with the goal of educating the public and shining the light on the need for attainable housing for our workforce in Placer County.

2017 Our structured tour series that takes donors to local nonprofits where they can see their operations and learn about their missions first-hand, is founded.

2018 Placer Community Foundation makes $1.48M in grants supporting youth, the arts, animals, community leadership, and health and human service causes.

2020 Placer County contracts with PCF to administer CARES Act funding to local nonprofits addressing the needs of our community during the Covid-19 pandemic. Grants this year total $4.3M.

2021 The River Fire strikes our community. Local donors respond immediately and through grants and partnership with the Auburn Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Nevada Fire Relief Fund, fire victims receive assistance.

2022 Mercy North Auburn at Rock Creek, a 79-home affordable family community, opens its doors on the County government campus after years of advocacy by PCF board members, staff, and volunteers.