Mr Hero also took part in a workshop hosted jointly by MCF and Changemakers Australia at the Australian Catholic University's Melbourne city campus. The workshop focused on how community foundations can play a leadership role in identifying and responding to community issues, in partnership with the community organisations they are supporting.

His message revolved around the role of community foundations in convening and collaborating to make social change. He reinforced the point that community foundations It turned out that every one of the groups had major fundraising projects for the next three years, projects that would see enormous competition between groups whose executives had never met each other.

The Silicon Valley Community Foundation proposed working collaboratively to raise a shared endowment which could contribute to sustainable funding for all the groups.

The collaboration raised an initial US$12million and under the agreed formula various arts groups were able to pay off their operating deficit, have a working cash reserve and a permanent endowment for the future.

Many of the donors were more willing to contribute to the endowment on the basis that it would be held and managed by the community foundation.

In this instance the community foundation was able to work with the arts community to attract funds that they could not raise individually and have an impact beyond the community foundation's own grantmaking capacity.