All posts by Tamara

Black men are heavy users of mobile technology, so why are they not pursuing careers in this field? This is the question that researchers at Pennsylvania State are investigating with a grant they received from the National Science Foundation as reported by The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. Lynette Kvasny and Eileen Trauth, both professors of information sciences and technology at Penn State are conducting interviews with Black men on the path toward careers in Information Technology in order to determine which factors encouraged them to make this decision. Dr. Kvasny presents a compelling question: “There’s so much technology in their world, but why do so few Black men make a connection between being a user of technology and making a career out of it?”

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This Friday, Bay Area Blacks in Philanthropy (BABIP) will be hosting their annual State of the Race Conference along with a reception to follow, Celebrating Black Philanthropy Gala. The theme of this year’s conference is “Politics, Power, and Philanthropy: A Bay Area Perspective”. Featured conference speakers include: Dana King, CBS News Anchor; Timothy Alan Simon, Public Utilities Commissioner; Carol Burton, Executive Director of Centerforce; and Nwamaka Agbo, Campaign Director of the Ella Baker Center. The “Celebrating Black Philanthropy” gala reception will feature a presentation and book signing by Valaida Fullwood, celebrated author of Giving Back: A Tribute to Generations of African American Philanthropists, as well as an awards ceremony honoring local African Americans for their philanthropic efforts.

• WHEN: Friday, October 19th, 2012
• WHERE: the historic One Leidesdorff building in San Francisco
• TIME: 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.

To learn more about the event and purchase tickets, please click here.

The deadline is fast approaching to apply for a scholarship to attend Women 2.0 PITCH NYC Conference & Competition on November 14th, 2012. Kapor Capital is teaming up with Women 2.0 and will be sponsoring five scholarships for women of color who cannot otherwise attend due to financial restraints.

The deadline to apply for a scholarship is this Sunday, October 14, 2012. Scholarship recipients will be notified by October 17, 2012.

PITCH NYC is a full day of speakers and panels sharing case studies, best practices and stories of successful business disruption in today’s new entrepreneur economy. Attendees will learn from talks by successful women executives and founders of startups and tech companies, and network with 800+ men and women in tech. There will also be mentoring available at lunch.

Brian Dixon, a Kapor Capital associate, will also be at PITCH NYC to meet and talk to anyone who wants to connect.

Apply here!

About a week ago, our grant partner, the Advancement Project released a concerning report, revealing that about 10 million Latino voters could be disenfranchised in the upcoming election due to voting legislation passed in more than 20 states. Detailed in Segregating American Citizenship: Latino Voter Disenfranchisement in 2012 are the different types of voter suppression laws and policies that are creating barriers for Latinos to vote, including:

• Alleged noncitizen voter purges of registered voters (in 16 states), which target naturalized citizens and may violate equal protection guarantees.
• Proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration (in effect in Georgia, and pending in Alabama and Arizona), which impose onerous and sometimes expensive documentation requirements on prospective voter registrants. These laws target naturalized citizens, many of whom are Latino.
• Restrictive photo ID laws in 9 states, which similarly impose costs in time and money for millions of Latino citizens who do not have the required documents.

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Only 52 percent of Black males and 58 percent of Latino males who graduated in 2010 received high school diplomas compared to 78 percent of their White male counterparts says the latest study released last week by the Schott Foundation for Public Education. Although the study shows an increase in graduation rates for young men of color since 2001-02, the disparity between them and their white peers remains vast. At this rate, it would take nearly 50 years for Black males to achieve the same high school graduation rates as their White male counterparts.

Of the states with the largest Black enrollments, North Carolina, Maryland, and California have the highest graduation rates for Black males, while New York, Illinois and Florida have the lowest. Arizona and Minnesota were the only states amongst the top ten ranked states, in graduation rates, with over 10,000 Black males enrolled.

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Election Day is just weeks away and Nonprofit Vote has come up with some good tips for voter engagement efforts that can have an enormous impact on turnout. Use the ideas below to engage your community and ensure everyone participates on November 6th!

1. Participate in National Voter Registration Day on September 25th and join thousands of nonprofits across the country as we register our communities to vote. It can be as simple as registering your staff or publicizing the voter registration deadline. (more…)

Did you miss the 2012 Ellas? Fortunately for you, we have a recap of the special evening organized and hosted by our grant partner, the Ella Baker Center held last week at the Scottish Rite Temple in Oakland. Ellas 2012, Unbreakable: Solidarity in Action brought the Bay Area social justice community together with a recognition celebration, highlighting the contributions of key individuals and groups who are doing extraordinary work in the racial justice, workers rights, and peace movements. Honorees included prominent changemakers, Rinku Sen, President and Executive Director of the Applied Research Center; publisher of Colorlines, Father Greg Boyle, Director and Founder of Homeboy Industries, and our grant recipient, domestic workers rights group, Mujeres Unidas y Activas.
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Does Obama face political opposition because he is black? Would he experience less challenges from conservatives if he were white? These are the kinds of discussions being raised in this election–questions that Jesse Washington explores in his latest Bloomberg Businessweek article “Does racial bias fuel Obama foes? How to tell?”. To be clear, we are reporting this news from a nonpartisan position. As a co-sponsor of the Smashing Bias Prize for hidden bias research, we have an ongoing interest in how implicit bias plays a role in different processes. Given the overlap with our civic engagement work, this article brings up important points to think about in trying to understand and uncover hidden bias and its pervasiveness in our country–particularly in an area which is not too often explored like the political arena. (more…)

We would like to congratulate the Texas League of Young Voters Education Fund, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and our grant partner, Advancement Project amongst other outstanding groups in their recent victory against voter suppression in Texas. Thanks to their organizing efforts, the federal court ruled last week that the Texas law requiring voters to obtain a photo ID in order to vote imposed “strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor.”

As we have seen across the country, voter ID laws have sprouted in various states with supporters claiming to combat voter fraud. The Texas League and the NAACP-LDF countered these claims arguing that the law would not correctly address voter fraud and instead disenfranchise a large portion of Texas voters. (more…)

This week our grant partners, ColorOfChange.org, announced that five more major national and global corporations have withdrawn from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the right-wing policy group responsible for pushing discriminatory voter ID legislation throughout the country. The latest companies to have joined the 38 others who have disinvested in ALEC include: General Electric, The Western Union Company, Sprint Nextel Corporation, Symantec Corporation, and Reckitt Benckiser Group plc.
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