Mitchell Kapor Foundation Weblog

I am so pleased to welcome Justin Davis to the Kapor Foundation staff as the program coordinator of the College Bound Brotherhood. In this capacity, Justin will create profiles of community-based organizations for our soon-to-be-launched public database of Bay Area college access programs as well as conduct college outreach to young men in Bay Area middle and high schools. He’ll also assist with grantmaking to Bay Area nonprofits working in this realm.

Justin is a Bay Area native and graduated from Stanford University in 2004 with a BA in Communications. He embraced the title of “student athlete” while at Stanford as a power forward for the men’s basketball team, helping guide them to three PAC-10 titles during his athletic campaign (no hateration allowed, Bears and Bruins)! After graduation, Justin pursued his dream of playing professional basketball in multiple European countries and domestically in the NBA.

Justin believes that many of his opportunities are attributed to the numerous mentors and teachers who believed in him and encouraged him to succeed. While no longer a professional athlete, Justin is very committed to helping young men of color receive the same educational and economic opportunities that he’s had. His interest in education, specifically in urban contexts, developed during his undergraduate senior year while taking graduate courses in education.

Justin aims to eventually develop and institute a national college-level program that focuses on the social and academic development of black student athletes, who historically have the lowest graduation rate of student athletes, to help develop them better prepare for post-collegiate professional careers.

We look forward to working with Justin and immersing him in the world of college access in the Bay Area!

We’ve just completed a process to identify new key partner organizations. And while the bulk of our funding will support this cohort, I want to reiterate to the broader community that we are still able to consider quarterly grant requests for special opportunities and efforts like convenings and tech-related work.

If you’re interested in learning more, please feel free to check out our regularly-updated guidelines (or keep reading the blog) and contact us to discuss your ideas.

Our Assistance & Advising program is launching our first communications workshop that will feature the expertise of our internal communications team.  Trevor Parham, Creative Director, and Sean Aquino, Creative Producer, will be leading this interactive workshop about communications strategy.  Attending will give you an opportunity to ask questions about various types of communications strategies, to learn from each other, as well as allow you to offer insight into what our future workshops around technology and communications strategy will be about.  Click HERE to register.  Also, you can find more information about this and future workshops, like our upcoming series on Program Evaluation, on our Assistance & Advising web page.  Hope to see you on March 9!

Just got word from Dion Ward at Northern California Grantmakers that the Kapor Foundation was mentioned (among others) in today’s Chronicle of Philanthropy for supporting Census outreach efforts.

In the coming weeks we hope to sponsor a funder briefing with NCG on the Census. Stay tuned for that announcement. Meanwhile, I’m glad the buzz is growing around the importance of the Census (I saw four different messages on BET this past weekend), and glad we could add our voices to the mix!

I’m happy to share that Kapor Foundation staff have new titles that better reflect the scope of our respective and collective work.

Carmen is now our Manager of Strategic Grantmaking. In this role, she will continue to oversee the Green Access program while also managing the statewide and local electoral empowerment VoICE grants. This will create a better synthesis between these two grantmaking areas, with grassroots civic organizing and leadership development as the common denominators.

Tiffany’s title has changed from the somewhat avant garde “Grantee Advocate” to Technical Assistance Manager. As you can see from our Assistance & Advising description, we’re formalizing and expanding the services that we offer to our key grant partners. Stay tuned for more information about two workshop series that Tiffany is about to launch.

And I remain your humble Director. While I will do less direct VoICE grantmaking in the coming months, I’ll still have general supervisory and strategic oversight of the Foundation’s activities.

Congratulations to Carmen and Tiffany! Stay tuned for two new additions to our team in the very near future (fingers crossed)!

The Foundation Center is having its annual open house in San Francisco on Tuesday, February 23, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.  As part of the open house, you can check out some of the Foundation Center’s most popular training programs for FREE.  You can drop by for refreshments and informative demonstrations throughout the day, but if you want to attend one of the free, full-length scheduled programs, click HERE to register, or you can call 415-397-0902. To register online, just click on the particular session that you want to attend in the Center’s calendar for February 23.

Here’s the Open House Agenda:

Full-length Scheduled Programs (requiring registration)

9:00-10:15 a.m. Fundraising in a Challenging Economy

10:30-12:00 p.m. Strategic Wisdom for Challenging Times – (Panelists: Jan Masaoka, Blue Avocado; Stephanie Roth, Grassroots Fundraising Journal; Charles Fernandez, TCC Group; Moderator: Lisa Hoffman, Nonprofit Consultant & Coach)

12:45-2:00 p.m. Innovations and Trends in Online Fundraising – (Presenter: Michael Stein, nonprofit tech strategist)

2:00-3:15 p.m. How to Approach a Foundation: From Initial Contact to Getting Funded — What Does it Take?

3:30-5:00 p.m. The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle: The Role Nonprofit Leaders Can Play in Turning a Vicious Cycle into a Virtuous One – (Presenters: Ann Goggins Gregory & Don Howard, The Bridgespan Group)

Demonstrations (drop-ins o.k.)

10:00-10:30 a.m. New Online Tools for Researching Funders

12:00-12:30 p.m. Spotlight on Resources for Individual Grantseekers

3:00-3:30 p.m. Hidden Electronic Treasures Available at the Center

4:30-5:00 p.m. A Baker’s Dozen: Featuring Staff’s Favorite Resources

Who would have thought the days of 2010 could go by so fast? It’s already February and we’re in the midst of a convening frenzy at the Foundation.  We are planning a number of really exciting convenings and conferences and to kick them off, we are sponsoring a fundraiser for Art in Action featuring Van Jones and Phaedra Ellis-Lampkins from Green for All.  Art in Action empowers youth leaders by engaging arts for social change through personal, social, political, and cultural education. They work collectively with youth from diverse historically disenfranchised communities impacted by violence through programs in music, media arts, spoken word/poetry, dance/theater, storytelling, and painting.  2009 was a great year for Art in Action as they were able to rehabilitate an office space and transform it into an amazing Green Youth Arts Media Center.  With support from the Mitchell Kapor Foundation as well as from the Pea Pod Foundation, they opened the doors this January to a space with recording studios, dance space, and a community garden.

This fundraiser is to make sure they are able to keep their doors open through 2010.  Since we recognize these are hard economic times and $200 maybe too steep for interested individuals, a number of tickets will be held at a discounted price.

Yesterday I heard a terrific briefing at the Haas Jr. Foundation (Thanks Cathy and Ted!) on the California redistricting process, which stands to be a great experiment in participatory democracy or  a hugely controversial process stunted by our national polarity. Or maybe some of both.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran a front-page article describing the process and the need for a pool of candidates who reflect the diversity of our state. The article drove me to look closer at the selection process for the California Redistricting Commission, which will be comprised of 14 citizen applicants, some randomly selected and others not. Criticisms of the lopsided applicant pool notwithstanding, the selection process alone promises to be thrilling, kind of like a civic lottery. I even checked out the application, which is due on Friday, February 12th. There has been a last minute push to spread the word to communities of color; I even received a video message in my personal email from the Northern California district director of my fraternity encouraging brothers to consider applying if we met certain eligibility criteria required by Proposition 11, which was passed by voters in 2008 to create the commission:

• Are a registered voter and have voted in at least two of the last three general elections.
• Have had consistent voter affiliation for five years.
• Had no conflicts of interest as outlined here.

If you, dear California voter, meet these criteria and are interested in participating in a process that will shape the immediate electoral future of our state, you have a week to get your name in the hat!

I was glancing through the latest issue of The Chronicle of Philanthropy and came across an interesting news briefing that said Americans who volunteer donate 10 times more money than those who don’t volunteer.  This was based on a study that Harris Interactive, a consumer research firm, conducted on behalf of Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund.  I would presume that individuals who care enough about a cause or organization to volunteer time may have a deeper connection to that particular cause than someone who does not.  It’s common knowledge that volunteers provide lots of in-kind support to organizations, with some organizations being completely volunteer driven.  But, this study shows that volunteers don’t just give their time.  They give their treasure as well.  I never thought much about this in the context of fundraising and the potential impact that volunteers can directly have on an organization’s bottom line.  But, this study suggests that it may pay to invest in building up your volunteer base, if your organization can support the use of volunteers.  For those of you who want to improve your volunteer outreach strategies, here are a couple of resources that may help: CaliforniaVolunteers, VolunteerMatch, and Volunteer Center.

Re: Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission:

The Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.

Hopefully this decision by the Supreme Court will create the popular and political tsunami needed to pass suitable fair elections and campaign finance limitation legislation.  Nick Nyhart, President of Public Campaign, wrote a compelling response on Huffington Post. Voter Action is even preparing a “Free Speech for People” campaign to push for a constitutional amendment in response (and be sure to spread the word about their awesome call to action video!).

Death sentence for democracy? We’ll see…