Mitchell Kapor Foundation Weblog

This past weekend, we attended two excellent gatherings: Applied Research Center’s National Facing Race conference and the 7^th annual Green Festival.

CARMEN:

The Facing Race conference provided an important opportunity for national organizers, activists, elected officials, artists, academics, and everyday community members to sit together and develop strategies in order create a national movement whereof race could be the centerpiece. Sponsored by the Applied Research Center (ARC), which is the home for media and activism on racial justice, the conference introduced the Compact for Racial Justice as a plan for fairness in and across communities throughout the country. This conference proved to be an important learning experience for all of those involved, as the large plenaries engaged issues ranging from the current economic crisis to teaching participants skills on how to place race at the center of current social justice debates.

The conference also built in smaller sessions where specific issues, movements, and programs could discuss their work using the issue of race as the frame. For example, I attended a discussion on how to inject a racial justice perspective into the emerging debate on green jobs. The presenters included Maka Agbo from Ella Baker Center’s Green Collar Jobs Campaign, who described the ways the campaign moved between policy making to job training in order to provide a comprehensive pathway towards a green economy.

In the days following the event, ARC’s media team pulled together a great set of informational videos like this one from the plenary titled “Race & The Election: November 4^th and Beyond”, which highlights key presentations from the conference. This, along with the many other informational sessions allowed for great discussions and a whole lot of learning.

TIFFANY:

The Green Festival was co-sponsored by Co-op America and Global Exchange and hosted 125 speakers, 350 local and national green businesses, and a number of community and nonprofit groups. All exhibitors were screened for their commitment to sustainability, ecological balance, and social justice using Co-op America’s green business standards. As a person who struggles to find consistent ways to incorporate a ‘greener’ lifestyle, I learned a lot from attending this event.

One of the most interesting speakers I heard was Dr. Ellis Jones, a professor from U.C. Davis, who has done extensive research on “the social and environmental responsibility of every company on the planet AND making it available in practical forms that individuals can use in their everyday lives.” This research was incorporated into a website, http://www.betterworldshopper.org/, that gives ‘grades’ to commonly used companies based on their environmental practices. If you’re curious about how the companies you frequently support are doing in the environmental arena, please check out the website. Dr. Jones said that every dollar we spend is a vote for or against environmental sustainability. I will definitely be tweaking the companies that I support as a consumer.

The most pertinent message that I took from Dr. Jones’ presentation is that each person can create a unique contribution in this movement to create a more sustainable environment. He said that our personal plans to improve our own ecological footprints will help change the world we live in. To me, this means that every effort that I make or that you make to recycle a plastic bag, or to support a local farmer, or to try walking to the train station instead of driving, or other achievable personal goals will contribute to this green movement.

I’m encouraged to push myself a little more each day, and as I travel home to Georgia this Thanksgiving, I will be sharing this message with my family as well.

Hi Grantees, Community Organizers, Green Activists, and MKF Partners!

My name is Carmen Rojas and I am the new Grants Officer at the Mitchell Kapor Foundation. It’s been an exciting couple of days as Tiffany, Cedric, and I develop our work groove and I begin to think about the future of our Green Access work.

As many of you know, we are deeply committed to participating in and supporting the conversations and organizing efforts occurring in the areas of climate justice, green jobs, and building healthy and sustainable communities of color throughout the Bay Area. I am here to make sure that we are a stakeholder in all of these areas as well as to support organizations that are on the ground doing and thinking about this work. Specifically, I will be overseeing and managing the grantmaking process in the area of Green Access as well as working with partners to define the opportunities and challenges for the future of this work.

I’m currently wrapping up a dissertation in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley so  I’ll only be in the office part-time until January, but I am excited to meet you in the coming months and start laying the foundation for our future work together.

We are extremely encouraged about the prospect of an Obama administration in which the target issues of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation — education, environment, and civic engagement — are well-aligned with the winds of change now blowing across the country.  Our lens on these issues — the focus on low income communities of color — also resonates with the inclusive message of the Obama campaign.  Indeed, these groups gave him his margin of victory in many states.

Of particular note is the campaign’s promise to partner with non-profits and social entrepreneurs to amplify government efforts to improve collective-well-being.  We look forward to convening the civic and voter engagement groups we funded to exchange lessons and help us chart our course going forward.  In addition, a joint project of the Level Playing Field Institute (www.lpfi.org) and MKF is to canvas programs focusing on STEM (science, technology, education and math) education for low income students of color so as to promote collaboration and identify effective models.  Emerging from our economic crisis depends in part on U.S. innovation.

As President-elect Obama says: Together, we can bring about the change we need.

Wow. I’m stunned. Elated. Much has been written already, so there’s little need for me to babble on, but I’m tremendously happy about the new incoming administration. Moreover, I’m deeply proud of our grantee and partner organizations and the various roles that they have played in helping to prompt the massive voter turnout and monitoring of the electoral process. We’ll soon be able to have a measure of effectiveness of their work as organizations begin to sort out their voter participation data. I can’t wait!

Sure, we as a nation still have a ways to go with respect to smooth elections administration, since elections oversight varies greatly from county to county. I’m factoring this issue into the Foundation’s grantmaking priorities for 2009. It isn’t too early to work on improving on our electoral processes now that voting is in vogue again!

On a strictly personal level, I’m mad and disappointed about the passage of Prop. 8, the latest in a series of mean-spirited, progress-limiting initiatives written into law (remember 187, 209, 227, and 22?). I continue to question the role – or even the legitimacy - of public policy making by mass balloting, particularly in today’s money and media driven campaigns.