Every three years, the Santa Barbara Foundation (SBF) takes a close look at the nonprofits at the heart of Santa Barbara County — examining challenges, strengths, and opportunities. Developed in partnership with the UCSB Center for Evaluation and Assessment and informed by nonprofit professionals throughout the county, this report documents the vital role these organizations play in delivering housing, food, health care, education, disaster response, environmental protection, arts and culture, and more. This summary includes data highlights and recommendations for how to support this vital sector in our county.
Data sources can be found within the full report. The Santa Barbara Foundation would like to extend a special thank you to DataLake for quantitative data analysis and to the Towbes Foundation for helping fund the research.
Click here to watch a webinar on the State of Nonprofits in Santa Barbara County: 2025 Report. In partnership with the Nonprofit Resource Network, key findings and recommendations from the research are presented by Anne Whatley, Director, Collaboration for Social Impact, Santa Barbara Foundation; Stacie Furia, PhD, Sr. Director of Learning and Evaluation, Santa Barbara Foundation; Tarek Azzam, PhD, Director, UCSB Center for Evaluation and Learning; and Natalie Jones, PhD, Associate Director, UCSB Center for Evaluation and Learning.
Watch the video “The Power of Nonprofits” here.
This report offers a comprehensive overview of the nonprofit industry in Santa Barbara County. Despite facing various disruptions such as recovery from the global pandemic and economic inflation, the report’s findings offer valuable guidance for stakeholders such as funders, practitioners, and government agencies to work together towards bolstering the sector. Furthermore, the data presented in this report can serve as a crucial resource for future and longitudinal studies on the nonprofit industry in Santa Barbara County.
Our hope is that this report will foster greater awareness and understanding, lead to increased investments in the nonprofit sector, help organizations improve their leadership and management abilities, and lift up key areas that require further investigation.
Santa Barbara Foundation would like to acknowledge the researchers at The Center for Evaluation & Assessment at UCSB as well as the many nonprofit professionals who took the time to provide valuable information on the state of their organizations.
Click here to download the full 2023 State of Nonprofit Reports in Santa Barbara County.
Click here to watch a webinar on The State of the Nonprofit sector with Tarek Azzam and Natalie Jones from the UCSB Center for Evaluation & Assessment, Miley Skover from the Nonprofit Resource Network, and Gary Clark, Santa Barbara Foundation’s Director of the Collaboration for Social Impact.
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