Archive for July, 2010

CompassPoint and the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training (GIFT) are pleased to announce that they will offer another year of the Fundraising Academy for Communities Color focusing on nonprofits based in communities of color in Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano Counties. The deadline to apply for this seven month academy is Friday, August 20^th.

The Fundraising Academy helps people of color led nonprofits that are primarily supported by foundation grants or government to build a base of supporters from the communities they serve and advocate for. With the worsening local and state budget crisis, grassroots fundraising is even more important- to raise money and to galvanize advocacy efforts.

The Fundraising Academy for Communities of Color helps individuals and organizations from communities of color to raise the funds they need in a more sustainable way, through diversity of sources and strong relationships with community donors. The academy has been successfully offered four times in the San Francisco Bay Area, and most recently in Los Angeles.  Over 80 organizations have completed the academy and participants consistently report that their experience in the academy has significantly shifted their groups approach, strengthened their skills to raise money from individual donors, and increased their goals and results.

For a complete description of the academy: Academy Program Information

Hear what past participants have to say:  Experiences in the Academy

To apply now or before August 20: Click Here

Thanks to the support of several foundations, the East Bay Fundraising Academy for Communities of Color is 90% subsidized.  If accepted, participating organizations will contribute a participation fee of $500 – $2,000 based on annual operating budget. The academy provides 8 full days of training and peer learning, 15 hours of one on one coaching, and Kim Klein’s new book “Reliable Fundraising in Unreliable Times” and a years subscription to the Grassroots Fundraising Journal.  Please review the academy information and discuss the investment of time and money in this program with key members of your organization before you apply.  Then, seize the moment and apply!

Image source: beyondwar.ning.com

On a panel at the Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy pre-Council on Foundations Conference in April, I presented four suggestions for social justice funders to consider.  Previously, I wrote about the first three of these, Find a Political Home, Build the Vehicles to Move us Forward and Develop your Skills as an Organizer. Below, I share the fourth of four suggestions.

4) Choose to be a Member

To be clear, I would only share this last suggestion with those who already engage their jobs, philanthropy and the larger non-profit sector with a commitment to social justice values and practices.

For those who do, I encourage us to see ourselves as members of a social justice movement rather than as something more removed, rather than to see ourselves simply as supporters.

As I’ve been taught to understand it, membership implies mutuality – mutual investment in one another, mutual ownership of our shared work, mutual accountability to shared goals, and mutual discipline and care in our approach  - in ways that the role or term of supporter or even volunteer do not.  While maybe only a subtle distinction, I do believe that it matters and particularly so in regards to the limits of where we go as a social justice movement.

As an example, a volunteer committee I was a part of became a membership committee of the community based organization with whom we worked.  To get to that point, it took years of working together, many missteps and months of consciously organizing ourselves as volunteers. It was a recognition of the trust, relationships and accountability built between us volunteers and the organization’s existing members and staff, but more importantly for all of us, it was an ask of us … it was an ask to not abdicate our respective positions, privileges or power, but to instead respectively bring them to bear in the organization’s grassroots organizing efforts and to tie our development, our growth and levels of commitment and responsibility with those of the organization’s other members.  As a funder, it’s also been the ask that I’ve been trying to answer in the affirmative.

End note: I realized in drafting these four suggestions, that any one of us could be entirely successful in our foundation jobs without following any of them.  But, having been in philanthropy now for some time, I’ve increasingly come to believe that to be successful as social justice funders we must at least consider thoughtfully each of these four suggestions.  And, I guess my hope is that for an increasing number of us, success as social justice funders is what we’re working towards.

A couple of months ago we invited Annie Leonard to our offices to present her amazing project of the Story of Stuff. Through a creative vehicle of live animation, Annie has transformed how people around the globe understand global production & consumption, the climate change debate, the environmental impact of bottled water, and now the industrial undersight of the cosmetics industry and the impact that lax regulation has had on the well-being of millions of people.

This past week her work was featured in the Los Angeles Times.  Throughout the article, “Telling Science with Cartoons” the author highlights the new approach to addressing the pressing issues of climate change and rampant consumerism.  In short, we are way beyond the droll power point presentations and yawn inducing data points, we are in a new moment of popular science brought to you be engaging and relevant narratives.  What is missed in the article is a deeper level of work that is happening through the efforts of activists 2.0.  She is not only opening up a scientific and economic discussion to millions of participants, she is also doing the work that many of our newspapers have forgotten how to do in the last 15 years: investigate the critical issues facing people and the environment and offer insight into the sources of these issues.  She is not only educating through animation, she is informing a popular debate about some of the most critical issues facing everyone and making sure that we can all actively engage in that debate with meaningful information.

My name is Richard Raya. I’m seventeen years old, and will be a senior this year at Berkeley High. I would have to say that I’m something of a nerd- albeit a sociable and athletic one. I love being lazy, reading, writing, playing video games and watching movies. And yet in spite of some of these somewhat immature mannerisms- or perhaps because of them- I have an intense fascination with concepts like equality and justice, and the entire idea of people helping each other. It seems to me that we all have a responsibility, to our communities and to ourselves; to be the very best we can and contribute to the lives of those around us. Thus, I’m very excited to be interning at the Mitchell Kapor Foundation. The work that gets done in the field of social justice is vital- it is the act of helping restore equilibrium to people that have long been marginalized so that we can all become more self sufficient and more powerful in our society. This entails ensuring that people have the means to support themselves, and their community, economically, socially and politically, which subsequently entails community organizing. However, during community organizing endeavors, one key demographic is often overlooked: youth. Youth make up a significant part of a community’s size and creativity, and as such can make a significant impact in the world around them. Young people, although they may lack the power to vote and may not have as much financial power as adults, still retain passion and idealism, and as such can contribute greatly to any social justice campaign’s volume and direction. This summer, I will be delving into various methods of facilitating youth organizing to ultimately conclude what organizations like the Mitchell Kapor Foundation can do to effectively aid youth organizers.

Deadline Extended to 7/12

The death of 19 year old Kevin Powell can be summed up in one word, tragic.  Kevin Powell’s story (who he was, what he dreamed of, etc.), which came to light a week after his death, seems to be a common one for many adolescents that died young; a good kid from a good family headed down a path of success, but somehow gets detoured.  Just weeks before Kevin Powell’s death, Hyman Taylor, Jr., a 27 year old former USF basketball player that was shot to death in Oakland, shared similar fate.

As I read both of these stories, especially Taylor, Jr.’s (me being an ex-college athlete), I could not help but to acknowledge that just being afforded the “opportunity” to better one’s self educationally and socially doesn’t guarantee much.  Both of these young men had an “opportunity” that not many young black men get, yet the end result for them was a violent death.  Taylor, Jr., was described as a talented student-athlete that had worked really hard as a high school student to redirect his life and put forth the necessary time and effort to become a Division 1 athlete.  Powell was a stellar athlete that dominated the basketball court and was once enrolled in Stuart Hall High, one of the most prestigious schools in San Francisco, but then bounced around from school to school and earned his GED rather than a scholarship to college.

What circumstances are causing the  trajectory of black males’ success to be altered?  I remember my mother once telling me that if I simply invested in my education, success will be inevitable.  I bought in.  Now, however, I feel that there are several social and systemic factors that impede and potentially prevent any chance for young black men to experience the benefits associated with pursuing a higher education.

These incidents further validate that young black men with unlimited potential are encountering unforeseen perils that are altering their trajectory towards success.  We cannot disregard the fact that the adversity that black youth encounter while pursuing a high school education and even post-secondary education is omnipresent.  It is critical that young brothers get continued support from the community and have positive influences in their life to help them maximize their potential.  As a community, we can no longer ostracize young brothers when they defy rules and challenge authority and then expect them to successfully manage grappling the harsh world that they live in.  As a community, we need to challenge ourselves to help these youth reassess their futures and assist them in getting back on the right course so they become the individuals that they are destined to be.

Photo source: SF Gate, courtesy of Powell Family

On a panel at the Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy pre-Council on Foundations Conference in April, I presented four suggestions for social justice funders to consider.  Previously, I wrote about the first two of these, Find a Political Home and Build the Vehicles to Move us Forward.  Below, I share the third of four suggestions.

3) Develop your Skills as an Organizer

One of the most remarkable aspects of social movements is that there truly is a role for everyone to play.  Regardless of your background, your relative privilege or lack thereof, your profession or where you live, there are ways to contribute and benefit.  Foremost of these is to organize – to consciously attempt to expand and amplify social justice analysis and work by allowing others to similarly have access to and ownership of social justice analysis and work, and by supporting those people to themselves become organizers.

As social justice funders, we must accept the responsibilities that come with being an organizer.  In particular, we need to organize where we’re at, to organize within philanthropy. Thankfully, many of us do.

But choosing to be an organizer might be the easy part.  The challenge is to be great organizers within philanthropy, to be both disciplined and thoughtful.  And so, we must intentionally find the ways to develop our organizing skills.  My hope is that there already exists curriculum, workshops and / or organizations that train us how to do so. Or, if not, that we can create them. Because, if we believe that what the community organizing groups we fund do is strategic, are acts that come as much from ones head as it does ones heart, then we can’t assume that we can be great organizers without ourselves being trained.  Developing our skills as organizers is an opportunity to more effectively and efficiently play our respective role in a larger social justice movement, while, at the same time, further developing our shared understanding and empathy with the thousands and thousands of other organizers in the country.

On a related note: I’ve found the tendency to restrict who we consider to be an organizer, whether  just to paid organizers or those who work only in certain communities, to be a dangerous and limiting one.  The question shouldn’t be who can be considered an organizer, but rather, once we popularize the title of organizer, how do we support individuals to fulfill the responsibilities, the work and the appropriate level of accountability that comes with by being an organizer.

Next post in the series: 4) Choose to be a Member

Dream the impossible and organize your heart out. – Priscilla Gonzalez, Director, DWU

On June 4th, I wrote here about the organizing work of domestic workers in New York and their efforts to pass the first ever state-wide Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. Today, I’m elated to share with you the following:

I was an open skeptic of this year’s US Social Forum.  I crossed my arms and huffed when anyone mentioned it.  I imagined an event teetering between Woodstock and the WTO protests in Seattle and although I loved Seattle, I wanted to make sure I stayed good and far away from Woodstock 2010.   I’m working on respecting process and consensus and folks in my life will emphasize the work part of that sentence.  After meeting with Tammy Lu from the Labor Community Strategy Center and cajoling from our own Mario Lugay, I landed in Detroit last Tuesday at 2am.

Detroit reminded me of the landscape in dystopic science fiction movies. While walking though the city Sadiyah Seraaj from the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy said that it looked like a city that was once vibrant and in a moment of crisis everyone stopped what they were doing and ran through the streets and out of Detroit.  So imagine this background, with  30,000 people from across the country meeting to build a national movement for social justice.  It was just amazing.  I visited amazing farms and gardens, connected with restaurant and domestic workers, and saw the future of movement building in this country.