Ripple making waves in Oakland with Steph Curry's Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation.
Volunteers and Ripple employees including Julien Douglas, left, and Senior Manager of Global Social Impact Jonathon Perri, middle, help pour cement while building a playground at Hoover Elementary School in Oakland, Calif. on July 14, 2023. (Photo by Adam Pardee for San Francisco Business Times)
By Simon Campbell – Special Projects Editor, San Francisco Business Times, Jul 27, 2023
Editor's note: This story highlights one of six Beyond the Check award winners. The awards, given annually as part of our Corporate Philanthropy Awards & Summit, honor companies that go to great lengths to share time, talent and technology with nonprofit partners in addition to robust financial support. Ripple is our winner in the Community Health category.
Steph and Ayesha Curry’s Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation has made creating safe, engaging and creative recreation spaces a central part of its philosophy.
Since 2019, the foundation has built playgrounds, delivered books and learning materials to kids in underserved communities in the East Bay. In the early days of the Covid 19 pandemic, it helped deliver 15 million meals to kids and families at need.
Crypto payment company Ripple has been a corporate partner through much of that time. The company donated $1 million to Eat. Learn. Play.’s pandemic meals. Yet Ripple’s support goes beyond economics.
The company has helped the foundation in more tangible ways too, with Ripple staff regularly volunteering time and manpower to work on Eat. Learn. Play. projects.
“They’ve been with us pretty much from the start and have been a huge partner in helping us have the impact that we’ve been able to have,” said Eat. Learn. Play. CEO Chris Helfrich.
Eat. Learn. Play. and its partners provide support for children in underserved communities, primarily in Oakland, through a three-pronged approach focusing on nutrition, education and physical activity.
The organization has invested $4.5 million in literacy programming and distributed 500,000 books to children in Oakland. The physical activity element is supported through schoolyard and community basketball court updates, summer camps and golf clinics.
“There’s a lot of benefits to play,” Helfrich said. “But at the heart of it is the recognition that play is a fundamental part of character development in children. While we know this to be the case, kids in the country, and Oakland specifically, are playing less than they have in generations.”
Only 9% of girls and 19% of boys in Oakland meet the meet the 60 minutes of physical activity per day recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, below the national average of 23%, according to research by the Aspen Institute.
“Some of that is due to lack of safe places to play. For others there are other barriers,” said Helfrich. “It’s our belief that these kids deserve great places to play. And we try to bring them to life in really creative ways.”
The imagination of a child is rarely matched by an adult when it comes to play.
Eat. Learn. Play. is using this as a way to create spaces that children want to be in. Kids are not just the recipients of these playground remodels, but designers too.
“We engage the school communities and the kids that we’re serving in the design process so that what we create is really an answer to their dreams,” Helfrich said. Companies like Ripple supply money and manpower to help those dreams come to reality.
At least 40 Ripple employees were part of a crew from Eat. Learn. Play.’s partners who dug holes, built garden beds, mixed cement and installed new equipment during a recent playground remodel at Hoover Elementary School in Oakland. The project is the third Eat. Learn. Play. playspace that Ripple has helped fund.
“This build taps into so much of what we value — reaching underserved communities, empowering our employees to create positive, hands-on change via volunteer efforts, and transforming lives through equity,” said Jonathan Perri, Ripple senior manager of global social impact.
Ripple’s philanthropy focuses on financial inclusion and blockchain education and research, along with sustainability, Perri said.
In 2018, the company launched Ripple Impact, a program designed to encourage employees to donate time and money in support of various nonprofits. The company then boosts these efforts through corporate matching, award donations and fundraising through employee resource groups. In 2022, Ripple employees supported 344 nonprofits globally.
For Helfrich, the partnership between Eat.Learn.Play. and Ripple exemplifies when the private and nonprofit sectors come together.
“There’s a role that all companies can play to advance the work that we’re doing,” Helfrich said. “Collaboration is at the absolutely heart of what we’re about and because of who our founders are, we do have a pretty unique convening power. And we try to use that to connect resources with needs in our community that serve kids in different and better and dignified ways.”
The partnership with Eat. Learn. Play. is an opportunity for Ripple to make a contribution that could benefit Bay Area communities for generations to come.
“These projects are more than just playgrounds and basketball courts,” Perri said. “Each of them allows us and our partners to increase equity among youth access to safe places. This provides kids with physical, mental, social and academic benefits that research shows can build skills and self-confidence to help them succeed in the long term.”
Ripple
HQ: San Francisco
Bay Area employees: 300 in the Bay Area out of a global total of 900+ employees
Project size and donation: This is the third playspace that Ripple and its employees have partnered on with the Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation. As a company Ripple has made more than $170 million in corporate donations since it was founded.