Mitchell Kapor Foundation Weblog

I’m excited to welcome Mario Lugay to the Kapor Foundation as the Associate Program Officer. In this role, Mario will be responsible for the Foundation’s national VoICE grantmaking and movement-building work. Mario will also work with Carmen on our electoral empowerment efforts in California communities of color.
Mario has an extensive background in civic engagement and community organizing. He and I first became acquainted through his work with the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation (FCCP), the national strategy and affinity group for philanthropy professionals involved with elections and other civic issues. Mario initially joined FCCP and the American Dream Fund as Program Associate and, in 2008, became FCCP’s first Program Director, where he served in this national role until January 2010 (and then we promptly snatched him up!).

Prior to that, Mario worked as the National Coordinator of Racial Justice 911: People of Color Against the War, consulted with Listen, Inc. to help bring a delegation of U.S. youth organizers to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and was the Development Coordinator for CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities in the Northwest Bronx. Mario has served on CAAAV’s Strategizing Committee and on the Community Funding Board of the North Star Fund in NYC. A native New Yorker, Mario earned a BA in political science from Columbia University.

We consider it quite a coup to be able to work with Mario. Please join us in welcoming him to the Kapor Foundation team!

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.

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)!

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!

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…

I’m excited to share the announcement for our latest position: Program Coordinator, College Bound Brotherhood!

This is a part-time (20 hours/week), salaried position with an excellent benefits package (health, dental, vision, PTO, life and disability insurance) in a respectful work environment – ideal for someone who has another part-time obligation or is enrolled in graduate school.

Please do not post this announcement on other websites without prior clearance.

Happy New Year everybody! Like many others, I’m glad to see the dawn of a new decade.

There are many things that I thought I’d never see happen, or that I’d be quite elderly before they did. Aside from the obvious and much-talked about one, I also never envisioned gay marriage being legal (although in precious few places, but still…). And as a native North Carolinian, I never thought I’d see the day when smoking was banned in public places in my home state.

During my childhood, tobacco was king. My high school is named after a tobacco baron. My grandfather, uncles, cousins, and stepfather all worked in the local tobacco company. It was steady agri-industrial work for high school grads with limited opportunities in the newly integrated/de facto segregated south.  I spent a summer sweeping the floors of a cigarette factory after my first year of college. And one of the nation’s fiercest basketball rivalries (go ‘heels!) plays out along the folksy-named Tobacco Road.

While North Carolina started to diversify its economic offerings in the 1980s, the tobacco industry still exerts a strong presence in the state. So imagine my surprise when I saw that, as of the beginning of this year, North Carolina restaurants and bars can no longer allow smoking (California fully enacted similar legislation in 1998).

This was a nice affirmation that change does come. And to paraphrase my grandmother, it “may not come when you want it, but it’s always right on time.” Let’s keep that in mind as we continue to work for equity, justice, and access during the coming year.