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.

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.

Just returned from a full week on the East Coast, where I experienced weather-related lows and highs (24F in Washington and 86F in Miami) and attended two mightily impactful meetings.

The Funders Committee for Civic Participation winter convening was chock full o’ learning and strategizing opportunities. Yours truly had the honor and pleasure of not only attending my first meeting as a newly-elected member of the Steering Committee, but also chatting with Lani Guinier, our keynote speaker. Professor Guinier, now serving on the faculty of Harvard Law School, is a prolific academic and author. She is perhaps best (and unfortunately) known for being thrown under the bus by a panicky first-term Bill Clinton during hearings about her nomination as Assistant Attorney General.

Professor Guinier continues to challenge traditional thinking about race and power in the U.S. She spoke with this rapt audience about the “electocracy” and questioned whether our current electoral system truly allows for representation. Actually, it wasn’t that simple; her assertion is that there are precious few spaces for public discourse around determining policy issues. She cited promising examples in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and domestically, in Chicago with a collective budgeting process (and thanks, Professor, for emailing me the article!).

FCCP participants also heard and discussed much new information about a precipitous drop-off in potential participation in the mid-term elections. Many voters who were energized by last year’s presidential elections are turned off, burnt out, or simply not motivated to vote in 2010. A similar civic burnout may also hamper participation in the dicennial census, due to kick off in March. Both of these events – elections and the census – have huge implications for communities across the nation – redistricting and reapportionment of Congressional seats, budget allocations according to population shifts, governor-ships, and the President’s policy agenda.

Just when I thought we might have a little respite, 2010 promises to be a tough year. Kudos to FCCP for yet another stellar meeting of the minds. These opportunities for funders synch up are always valuable and serve our individual and collective work well.

I also had the great pleasure of attending the “Transformational Leadership Retreat” sponsored by the Open Society Institute and the Knight Foundation in Miami. Organized by and for OSI’s Campaign for Black Male Achievement grant recipient organizations, this three-day convening provided a forum for networking, reflecting, and most importantly, galvanizing around a common agenda for promoting efficient and effective work with black men and boys in programs throughout the nation.

After dodging a contamination scare, and without betraying any confidences from the conversation circle, I found it liberating to finally break the unspoken tension around the role of gender equity and inclusion in this work – namely, how do we appropriately and respectfully include women in this male-focused work? While we collectively recognize the importance of focusing on this very “endangered” demographic group, we also need to develop an appropriate gender lens – what do we mean, exactly, when we talk about “manhood”?

While the discussion was impassioned and even tense, it was a very necessary bridge to cross as we try to work together as a community to ensure better pathways and futures for young black men and their families, neigbhorhoods, and greater communities.

All in all, the trip was simultaneously terrific and sobering. And I got to wear shorts and a pea coat in the same week.