Tom Silk

1937 - 2022

Tom Silk
December 12, 1937 - January 25, 2022
The San Francisco Bay Area is a powerhouse of social change with impacts that reach regionally, nationally, and globally, but it might not have evolved quite that way if it weren't for Tom Silk.

Silk was a pioneering tax lawyer who returned to the Bay Area from Washington DC in 1968 and found a burgeoning counterculture eager for activism but short on the legal acumen to make it happen. In the ensuing decades, Silk used his charisma, intellect, and intimate knowledge of tax law to help transform not only individual organizations but the entire nonprofit sector into an organized, tax-exempt force for change. He played a pivotal role in the creation and evolution of organizations as diverse as the San Francisco Zen Center, the Trust for Public Land, the Tides Foundation, Glide Memorial Methodist Church, California Lawyers for the Arts, Mother Jones, San Francisco SafeHouse, and hundreds of others. His clients remember him as a wizard who could open the doors to nonprofit status as well as offer individuals, families, and corporations with wealth vehicles through which they could invest in social movements and societal change. He enabled scores and eventually hundreds of passionate humanitarians, environmentalists, civil libertarians, artists, musicians, worshippers and contrarians to organize, stabilize, and thrive.

He was all those things himself. Silk's clients not only benefited from his legal and governance guidance, but also returned the favor and enriched his life, his outlook, his sense of possibility. He was charming, erudite, and irreverent, and also irascible, stubborn, and loved to challenge ideas.

After graduating from UC Berkeley School of Law in 1963, practicing for four years at the U.S. Department of Justice's Tax Division where was appointed special assistant to the chief and received the highest award given by the Attorney General, and another four years at the venerable firm of Brobeck, Phleger and Harrison, in 1972 he opened his own practice in San Francisco specializing in representing charitable or public benefit organizations. Silk's sole practice eventually grew into the premier law firm for the nonprofit sector, a firm called Silk, Adler and Colvin.

"I have been a Silk-watcher for fifteen years," wrote Yale Law Professor John Simon, founding director of Yale's program on Nonprofit Organizations, in 1998. "The nonprofit sector wouldn't be what it is today but for Tom Silk," according to Tom's friends, clients, and law partners. He professionalized the charitable sector, resulting in a wide variety of best practices, standards, and legal decisions. Later in his career, he became a distinguished national and international scholar of philanthropic jurisprudence and taxation, a law professor, and an expert witness in state and federal courts.

Silk's international work began with serving as Legislative Counsel to the Republic of Palau in the late 1970s as they began their journey to become an independent republic. He lectured throughout the 1980s and 1990s on comparative nonprofit law to government officials and activists abroad across Asia, Eastern Europe, and Mexico; and co-directed a three-year scholarly review of nonprofit legal systems in ten Asia Pacific nations commemorated in the book Philanthropy and Law in Asia (1999).

During the last decade, Silk became an active and adored member of the Stinson Beach community, and the cherished husband of former Mill Valley mayor Kathleen Foote. He died at home on January 25, at age 84. He is survived by his wife Kathleen Foote of Stinson Beach, daughter Nicole Silk and grandchildren Alden and Ariana Soto, all of Colorado, his sister Margie Hancock of Lincoln CA, and former wives Arlene Silk, Susan Clark, and Suzanne Royce. In lieu of flowers, donations can be directed to River Network (https://www.rivernetwork.org/) and memories shared here (https://www.kudoboard.com/boards/gxKKr6kS). A memorial event will be scheduled later.