Mitchell Kapor Foundation Weblog

Over the past week, a few job announcements have come into my mailbox. Thought I’d compile distribute them. Please send broadly to those who might be qualified. I’m especially interested in promoting the ED position at our sister organization, Level Playing Field Institute. Let’s find some great people for these organizations and efforts!

Level Playing Field Institute: Executive Director;  Education Programs Associate

Women’s Foundation of California: Development and Communications Director

Community Housing Partnership: Executive Director

Just last week I had the opportunity to meet Bob Edgar, former U.S. congressman and current president of Common Cause. He stopped by for a visit while in town with Nick Nyhart, president of our grant partner organization, Public Campaign. They were on a West Coast tour of sorts, updating activists and funders on their collaboration work. So I was glad to open up the Sunday Chronicle and see an editorial discussing clean elections and the potential impact of  the Citizens United vs. FEC case now before the U.S. Supreme Court. A ruling in this case could essentially roll back restrictions on corporate giving to federal campaigns. Nick and Bob are great leaders in the movement to improve the integrity of U.S. elections as representing the will of the our communities, not companies. The necessary distinction between democracy and capitalism has gotten too blurry for my comfort…

I was also happy to stumble upon an excerpt in the Washington Post written by a former student of mine! Lanre Akinsiku is a recent IDEAL Scholar and graduate of UC Berkeley who is now a Coro Fellow out of southern California.  He had thoughtful insights on the opportunities and limitations of corporate social responsibility. Go Lanre! Go Lanre! Do the daggone thing! I’m so proud!

I feel quite fortunate to have role models and other professional peers whom I admire in the broader philanthropic and civic engagement movements. Thomasina Williams is one of these people. She’s the Program Officer for Democracy, Rights and Justice Program at the Ford Foundation and has a rich herstory as a civil rights attorney and legal advocate for social justice. We met through the Funders Committee for Civic Engagement, where she serves on the Steering Committee. More than once I’ve asked myself, when at the crossroads of a grantmaking dilemma, “What would Thomasina do?” I trust her vision and observations about the power dynamics inherent to electoral politics and what marginalized communities must do in order to break our elections processes free from the stranglehold of big money.

A conversation with Thomasina last week gave me the following inspiration: we must push beyond “diversity.” We’ve heard it used as lingo to indicate that people were at least *considering* the racial/ethnic/gender makeup of a particular entity. Yet, superficial treatment of representation doesn’t ensure that people’s voices, experiences, and opinions are taken into consideration during decision-making processes. Diversity in and of itself does not guarantee that pluralism is woven into setting policy or direction.

If we’re going to really embrace this nation’s diverse demographics, we also have to be willing to build our institutions that are inclusive from the beginning. And if they aren’t inclusive from the beginning, they are doggedly determined to have appropriate representation on the staff and board.  “We’re thinking about it” is so 1987. Do it. And – to borrow another inspiration from the intrepid Ludovic Blain, if orgs aren’t inclusive and don’t have appropriate representation, stop claiming to be diverse or represent diverse communities. Tokenism doesn’t count. Having racial and gender castes by job level (from executive leadership to support staff) doesn’t either.

We’ve made great progress in this nation; I remain cautiously optimistic that we can get even closer to the American ideal of “liberty and justice for all.” For real.

Hi there! It’s been a booming and bustling couple of months with trips to Alaska and Washington DC, planning for next year, and making sure that all of our ts are crossed before we let go of yet another year. On the Green Access front, we’ve had an amazing couple of months.

I was lucky to work with a couple of amazing leaders in social justice philanthropy to pull together a panel for this year’s Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA) convening in Anchorage, Alaska. The panel titled, “Broadening the Base: Redefining Environmentalism in the Age of Ecological and Economic Crisis” featured the work of amazing leaders from WeAct from New York, Power U from Miami, and the Indigenous Environmental Network from Arizona. The panel was a great reflection on how low-income communities of color are building power to address these pressing issues. That same month, I contributed a journal article to the EGA journal titled, “Minding the Justice Gap: Bay Area Collaborations Offer a Model for Hard Times”, which you can find here.

Last week I was in Washington, D.C. with an amazing collaborative of funders at the 10th anniversary Health and Environmental Funders Network meeting. The meeting offered a rich learning environment and an opportunity to connect with progressive funders that are building bridges between climate change, community health, reproductive justice, and food security. The highlight of the meeting was learning about the Cleveland Green Co-op model, which has been an amazing engine for economic development, a solid pathway out of poverty, and a hands-on strategy to fight climate change.

This weekend is the Green Festival. If you haven’t been, you really can’t miss it! Its three days filled with the best in green with more than 150 renowned speakers and 400 green businesses, this event is great for everyone, so get out there and fight the green fight!

Yes, it’s true that we’ve been falling off with our blog entries. As some of you have already heard first hand, we’re (hopefully) in the final stages of our program planning for 2010, which we started in earnest last July.

When this grantmaking program structure was launched in August 2007, we decided to learn about and participate in the respective program arenas, green justice and civic engagement, by meeting key players and supporting promising work by effective organizations. This learning process would allow us to evaluate our work and make better decisions about how to better target our resources and efforts for the long haul in the progressive movement. In trying to maintain the equilibrium between our capacity, our interests, and the revenue available for grantmaking and programs (which was cramped by the economic recession, of course), this may mean that we work with fewer organizations over time toward a commonly-identified goal. As a matter of fact, all of the supplementary research and thinking that we’ve done thus far supports that strategy. But our plan ain’t finished cookin’ yet.

By the beginning of December, we hope to have our 2010 program plans in place. Our three core program areas – Green Access, VoICE, and the College Bound Brotherhood – will stay the same. We will still have a general request for applications.  But we will most likely have other, deeper changes in store.

Please stay tuned and check back with us (via the website) in December about moving forward in 2010. We’re getting ready by spending more time planning and less time blogging!

(Artwork borrowed from thewritingloft.com)