Drummond Pike was born in San Rafael, California in 1948, the third of four brothers. His father, Peter Pike, was an investment banker. His mother, Catherine Cline Pike, was Marin County’s first female pediatrician.

He majored in political science at the University of California at Santa Cruz and gained note as an anti-Viet Nam War protester. He was selected as campus representative to the Board of Regents during his senior year in 1969, where he was known as an aggressive student-power advocate.

In 1970, activists from the Ford Foundation-created Center for Community Change set up The Youth Project in Washington with Pike as associate director. It was a pass-through funding group (and Tides prototype) of rich young heirs who financed poor young activists in anti-business community organizing.

The Center itself was funded by early progressive foundations: the Stern Family Fund, Needmor Fund, Abelard Foundation, DJB Foundation, J.M. Kaplan Fund, Helen Lehman Buttenwieser’s Joint Foundation Support, and Stewart R. Mott Charitable Trust, giving Pike his first big-money connections.

Pike earned a master’s degree in political science at Rutgers University while with the Project, then returned West to open its San Francisco office, but was soon hired away by Youth Project funder Alan S. Davis, son of insurance mogul (and AARP co-founder) Leonard Davis, to lead his Shalan Foundation, which was incorporated in New York (1969), but housed in San Francisco.

In 1976, when Pike had just joined Shalan, a young couple from New Mexico approached him with a problem: they wanted to donate anonymously and needed a public foundation to handle their grants. Shalan couldn’t accommodate them, so Pike and Jane Bagley Lehman, president of Arca Foundation (1970-1980, see p. 135), co-founded the Tides Foundation as a public charity to help them.

Other donors came, and Pike ran Tides out of his desk drawer at Shalan for several years. His first big coup was helping Norman Lear create People for the American Way in 1980, when he also helped establish the National Network of Grantmakers, today the premier left wing donor association.

In 1981 Davis gave Pike a year to separate. At year end, Pike and Tides went independent and rented offices with Lyman Casey’s Bothin Helping Fund.

Pike has since created numerous ventures: Tides Center (1996); eGrants.org (now Groundspring. org) for online giving; Tsunami Fund (a 501c4) for lobbying; Highwater, Inc. for real estate development; Working Assets for fundraising; Tides Shared Spaces, a real estate empire renting non-profit office space with addresses in New York, New Orleans, Anchorage, and Salem (Oregon); and Tides Canada for global expansion, with a prospective Tides Japan.

Wade Rathke, ACORN co-founder, has been a Tides director from the start.

Pike married Elizabeth "Liza" Cohen in 1982, a Berkeley grad who helped create Resource Media for environmental group outreach.

They have two children, Rachel Catherine (1984), a Gates Scholar at Cambridge in chemistry (she spent her junior year in Tanzania), and Maxwell MacGavin (1987), who graduated from Marin Academy prep school in 2005 and volunteered with ACORN Relief’s Hurricane Katrina project in Houston, Texas.

Pike and his wife live in an ocean-view home in Mill Valley, an upscale suburb north of San Francisco, just across the Golden Gate. They also own a million-dollar chalet near Donner Summit in Truckee, California.