About the Saints & Sinners Fund

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Saints & Sinners has a very colorful past. Originally organized in the early 1950’s by a group of San Franciscan businessmen, the original initiative was to fund the Mother’s Milk Program, the vehicle providing milk throughout the public school system in the Bay Area and California in general. In order to accomplish this agenda, these enterprising businessmen set out to raise as much money as they could by selling raffle tickets on the streets of San Francisco and other various places, raffling off an abundance of phenomenal prizes. Among them were houses, cars, trips, and other sundry items. Such prizes were donated by the local business community, which believed in this noble effort.

The name, Saints and Sinners, is quite unique. A group of entertainers and businessmen in New York had convened a fraternity of sorts to socialize over dinner. One of the gentlemen had ties to a few folks in San Francisco, which led to establishing a chapter on the West Coast. The San Francisco contingent, however, pursued a more noble avenue of assembling for both entertainment as well as social contribution. The name represents the nature of these philanthropists in how they saw themselves. Convening over the lengthy bohemian type lunches (thus “Sinners”) to discuss what they could do for the community of San Francisco, they saw the good in their effort (thus “Saints”), and the name was given new meaning.

In the 1960’s, the State of California took responsibility for the milk program in the public schools, and the Saints and Sinners Fund considered disbanding. But these avid supporters of children causes in the Bay Area decided to create a long lasting means to avail the resources of the fund to worthwhile not-for-profit agencies focused on underprivileged children, including healthcare, education and domestic disruption. And so they left the corpus in place, and began distributing the income on an annual basis to a variety of children-related agencies. Its goal was, and continues to be, the enrichment of the lives of our young people, that may be disadvantaged in various ways.

Over the course of the last forty years, the Saints and Sinners Fund has made grants totaling almost $4 million to a litany of organizations committed to improving the livelihoods of our most important investment, the children of our future, that are in need.

In its pursuit of contributing to the Bay Area’s fabric, Saints and Sinners has developed unique relationships with the Lionel Steiner Trust and the Charles A. Becker Foundation, which contribute a portion of their respective incomes to Saints and Sinners for additional grant making. To sustain its funding capability, it has recently commenced a matching contribution program, wherein the Becker Foundation has committed to match new contributions into the Fund, in order to increase the size of the Fund, of which the income is used for grant making.

As the needs of the community continue to grow, with ever increasing costs of healthcare, social programs, and education, Saints and Sinners is looking at new initiatives to continue and enhance its contribution to local agencies. The Fund welcomes new benefactors, contributing both time and funding, to become part of a wonderful tradition.