Somewhere around the third song at Concerts-in-the-Park this summer, when Native Elements had the crowd on their feet for a reggae set on August 9th, I found myself wondering who actually signs the check for this. Not the city, as it turns out. Not a corporate sponsor with a banner on the gazebo. A small, all-volunteer nonprofit called the Belvedere Community Foundation, run by a rotating board of neighbors, funds the concert series, the film festival that follows it in the fall, the water fountain at the Lagoon Road tennis courts, and a good chunk of what makes Belvedere feel like it runs itself.
It doesn't run itself. It runs on donations and a small group of people who keep showing up.
The city doesn't do this. A nonprofit does.
Belvedere is a small city, home to just over 2,000 residents according to recent population estimates, and it has two public parks, one playground, one community center, and two tennis courts total. There's no dedicated parks-and-recreation department writing checks for a summer concert series. Recreation programming runs through the Belvedere-Tiburon Joint Recreation Committee, known locally as The Ranch, which is financially independent of the city itself.
Into that gap steps the Belvedere Community Foundation, or BCF, a nonprofit whose own materials describe its purpose as helping sustain the city's natural beauty and quality of life by funding projects that bring the community together. It is explicit that it is not a city organization and receives no tax dollars. The city's own website credits BCF with directly funding over $100,000 in grants in a recent year, and the foundation's holiday update for 2024 put that year's total closer to $200,000. The gap between those two figures isn't a contradiction so much as a reminder that this is a fluctuating, donation-driven budget, not a line item anyone can count on year to year.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. When a city department funds something, it's insulated by a tax base. When a volunteer foundation funds something, it's insulated by whoever picks up the phone this year.
One lineup, four Sundays, and a closing act you can still catch
Concerts-in-the-Park has been a Belvedere tradition since 1998, and this year marks its 24th season. The 2026 lineup ran Super Diamond on Father's Day, June 21, followed by Big Crush on July 12 and Native Elements on August 9. If you missed all three, there's one date left on the calendar: Foreverland, a Michael Jackson tribute, closes the season on Labor Day Sunday, September 6, at 4 p.m. in Belvedere Community Park.
The concerts are free, but they aren't free to produce, and the city's own concert page is candid that the series relies on donations from attendees in addition to support from the city and BCF. The co-chairs listed for this year's series are Peyton Stein and Adam Gavzer, alongside a committee that includes Sally Burr, Jerry Butler, Roger Felton, Nena Hart, Maureen Johnson, and Kathy Pearson.
That name Adam Gavzer is worth pausing on, because it shows up twice.
The same handful of neighbors run more of this than you'd guess
Adam Gavzer isn't just a concerts co-chair. He's the person who conceived and created the Belvedere Home Made Film Festival, now in its third year. The festival started as a one-off in October 2024, when more than 100 residents packed Community Park for an inaugural night of 32 short films made by neighbors, capped by a flashmob finale led by Belvedere's own Police Chief Jason Wu. By its second year, the festival had grown to 33 submitted films and drew families across generations, according to coverage in the Redwood Bark.
This year's kickoff party ran June 12 at the Belvedere-Tiburon Library, and free filmmaking workshops have been running on Saturdays from June through September, teaching residents the basics of scriptwriting, cinematography, and editing before the fall screening night. The festival is community-sourced by design: past entries have included a short about a Belvedere mail carrier's daily route and a father-daughter film called "Red Button," made by residents with no professional filmmaking background.
The reason this matters isn't the trivia of who's on which committee. It's that Belvedere's social calendar, the part that makes the town feel tightly knit rather than just wealthy and quiet, depends on a handful of the same volunteers wearing multiple hats. That's not a criticism. It's an honest description of how a city this size sustains anything beyond basic services. If two or three people stopped volunteering, you would feel it within a season, not a decade.
The unglamorous stuff BCF funds is the tell
It's easy to notice the concerts and the film festival because they're events with a date on a calendar. The more revealing evidence of how BCF operates is the stuff nobody thinks to ask about.
The foundation funded a new water station at the Lagoon Road tennis courts, the same two courts at Tom Price Park where one court doubles as pickleball space. It's a small, unglamorous fix, the kind of infrastructure a bigger city's public works budget would absorb without a press release. Here, it took a grant application and a donor.
BCF also funded WildCare's Family Nature Day at the Richardson Bay Audubon Center, an event honoring the legacy of Elizabeth Terwilliger, the naturalist whose techniques for teaching kids about local wildlife became the basis for what's now known as the Terwilliger Nature Guide program, later absorbed into WildCare's education department. This year's Family Nature Day drew more than 200 children and adults for animal encounters, owl pellet dissections, and guided walks through the Audubon Center's meadow and shoreline.
The foundation's list of supported causes reads like a map of everything a resident might assume is simply provided: the Landmarks Society, the Tiburon Peninsula Traffic Alliance (formerly the Yellow Bus Challenge, which helps fund reduced-rate school bus passes for families in the Reed Union School District), an art gallery program at the Bel-Tib Library, and general upkeep of the city's parks and landscaping.
None of it is mandated. All of it is optional, dependent on a funding cycle that has historically closed applications around March and August each year, and dependent on donors who keep giving because a neighbor asked them to.
What this actually tells you about living here
The takeaway isn't sentimental. It's structural. Belvedere works because a small number of residents choose, year after year, to run the civic infrastructure that a larger town would staff and budget for. The concerts, the film nights, the tennis court water fountain, the nature day at the Audubon Center: these aren't amenities the city guarantees. They're the output of a volunteer board's fundraising in a given year, which means the character of the town is more fragile and more personal than it looks from the outside.
If you've been to a concert this summer, you've benefited from that structure without necessarily knowing its name. Foreverland on September 6 is the last chance this season to see it in action before the calendar turns to the Home Made Film Festival's fall screening night at Community Park.
I think about this kind of quiet infrastructure often in my work here, because it's part of what makes a place like Belvedere different from a comparable price point somewhere else. The town's small size means its systems, formal and informal, matter more than they would in a larger city. If you're already living here, it's worth knowing who's actually behind the traditions you look forward to each year. And if you're thinking about what a longer-term move in Belvedere might look like, from timing a sale to understanding what a specific block or property is actually worth in today's market, that's a conversation I'm glad to have directly.
Raquel Newman works with sellers and buyers across Belvedere and the Tiburon Peninsula. If you'd like to talk through the market or explore what your home could be worth, request your private market valuation any time.
