Mitchell Kapor Foundation Weblog

Looking forward to more work and words in 2009. Until then, have a restful and pleasant holiday season.

Flickr photo by Thomas Hawk

Community change is built through collaboration, trust, and vision. Foundations are committed to these principles and are actively working together to understand our role in building change. Instead of functioning as individual entities, we are looking to each other as partners in order to better support the efforts of community based organizations.

CARMEN: The Health and Environmental Funders Network (HEFN) is a network of funders committed to grantmaking at the nexus of environment and health. By building this cross-cutting philanthropic community, HEFN and its members are supporting an increasingly powerful movement towards healthier people, ecosystems, and communities. At this week’s HEFN-CA annual convening, funders gained an understanding of the environmental funding landscape in California as well as developed an understanding of systems analysis work. We also heard from a panel of amazing organizers and legal advocates who made it clear that the Central Valley in California has become the new front line of social and environmental justice work.

Photo from: http://www.macalester.edu/americanstudies/enviroart.

TIFFANY: The Social Justice Funders Group is a collaborative of Bay Area grantmaking organizations committed to promoting social change through philanthropy. The group meets regularly throughout the year for ongoing conversations, information sharing, and strategizing about issues pertinent to social justice. In our most recent November meeting, we discussed the impact of the current economic crisis on each of our social justice grantmaking strategies, ways to get involved in the work surrounding AB 624 legislation regarding the scarcity of foundation giving to low-income communities and communities of color, and the impact the latest Presidential election may have on the social justice movement.

Photo from lesleymcdade.blogspot.com.

CEDRIC: I just returned from the annual meeting of Funders Committee for Civic Participation, which “brings together grantmakers committed to enhancing democratic involvement in all dimensions of civic life.” This year’s gathering focused on debriefing the results of the 2008 elections, which were monumental in certain ways but left room for improvement (i.e. additional voter participation and smoother elections administration) in others.  In session after session, we discussed stats, implications, and strategies for looking ahead. Through these gatherings and monthly phone calls, FCCP is a breeding ground for philanthropic idea-sharing and collaborations. I especially appreciate the trust and camaraderie shared by FCCP members as we jointly seek to make this democracy work for all Americans, residents and citizens alike.

I want to revisit a post that I wrote two months ago, admittedly more optimistic than I am now about the impact of the economic crisis on philanthropy and nonprofits.  As a sector, we’re in for a tough road in 2009; there’s no getting around it. I hear news almost daily of foundations losing assets and tightening up on grantmaking.

The Mitchell Kapor Foundation isn’t exempt from this madnesss, of course, but we’re committed to maintaining current overall funding levels in the first three quarters of the new year. We’ll keep a close eye on our investments and assets throughout 2009 and will make a better determination about 2010 as we see how the economy responds.

The implication here is that we’ll probably focus on renewal relationships and make many fewer new grants. If you’re interested in engaging with us for the first time, please call me or Carmen Rojas before proceeding with the grant application.

My hope - the silver lining - is that this recession will encourage further entrepreneurialism and efficiency across sectors. We’ll try to do our part.

Juliet Ellis of Urban Habitat invited me to attend the recent National Black & Latino Summit, held in Los Angeles earlier this week. The Summit, sponsored by PolicyLink and the William Velazquez Institute, was the initial gathering to set an agenda for building alliances between African American and Latino/Hispanic communities, capitalizing on the perhaps unprecedented levels of excitement and mobilization around the Presidential elections.

As you well know by now, ours are the largest ethnic groups of people of color in the U.S. (even though there are black Latinos, but that’s another story); together we’re projected to comprise nearly half of all Americans in the next 40 years. One could assume a natural connection between black and brown people, given that we face similar marginalization-based challenges around health, education, criminal justice and housing, but perceptions over lack of jobs, community safety, and resources have caused tension between the two broadly-defined groups. (Am I saying anything that you don’t already know?) Nevertheless, goodwill and shared accomplishments do exist, and I was quite moved by the connections across ethnicity and geography that I witnessed.

Angela Glover Blackwell, Founder and CEO of PolicyLink, presided over the Summit, directing the 500 plus attendees not to expect answers by the end of the short gathering, but to consider this the first step in many conversations and actions that will grow to include other allies as well.

Highlights:

• Robert Ross, President of the California Endowment, shared an introductory anecdote about Fish and Jazz Fridays with his black father and Arroz con Gandules and Salsa Sundays with his Latina mother, all under the same roof while growing up in the Bronx.
• Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spoke about historical connections made by community organizers, most famously by Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King, Jr., but also enacted by many others.
• Following a thoughtful performance by dance company CONTRA-TIEMPO, Tavis Smiley directed an interesting panel on the role of arts, culture, and activism in helping to unify and transform communties.

There were two large panel discussions on eight issues (criminal justice, immigration reform, education, workforce, transportation, health disparities, housing, and environmental justice). Each panel discussion was based on working policy briefs distributed in advance. Dr. Manuel Pastor outlined areas  of critical importance in workforce development, an especially sensitive issue in low-income Latino and black communities that view each other as competition for “unskilled” jobs. Dr. Robert Bullard, john a. powell, and James Bell made provocative remarks on educational challenges, environmental justice, and criminal justice, respectively (wish I could detail them more fully here).

I had mixed feelings about the small group “fishbowl” exercise that we participated in, but it provided a glimpse into a guided (and somewhat polite) all-Latino conversation about potential conflicts and connections with African Americans. This helped me to develop a starting point of sorts for understanding certain perspectives. Later I challenged our entire cohort of blacks and Latinos to take alliance building with us into everyday interactions by taking advantage of “teaching moments” and confronting bigotry, stereotypes, and xenophobia whenever possible.

This may sound Kumbaya to more skeptical ears, but such convenings are vital baby steps in a longer, larger race. I left the Summit with a terrific sense of hope that, as my favorite poet Nikki Giovanni once wrote, “all good people/could come together/and win without bloodshed.” Yes we can.

Someone asked me how the current economic crisis is impacting the Foundation. Great question! We’re very fortunate to have brilliant, social justice-oriented investment officers and money managers looking out for our best interests. They’ve devised a strategy that should enable our investment portfolio to weather this terrible storm pretty well (see an edited version of Mitch’s recent slideshow presentation to staff).

Speaking of investments, we’re working to further align the values that guide our grantmaking and investments, particularly around green jobs and businesses. As I understand it, our basic principle is to gain a high return for “positive impact” portfolio investments, which will further support our positive impact “investments” in community-based organizations through our targeted grantmaking. We seek to be as green and socially-responsible as possible. (But PLEASE do not take this as a call for portfolio investment pitches – heed the old saying: “Don’t call us…”)

At any rate, as we move through our 2009 budgeting process, we’re committed to supporting grantees, both new and continuing. The next round of grant requests is due on November 7th for consideration at our December Board meeting. So despite the economic turbulence, we intend to proceed steadily and deliberately.

Photo by Christopher Chan via Flickr.

Check out the job description and send us your materials if interested!

Benjamin Jealous is preparing to take the helm of the NAACP as the youngest President in the organization’s 100+ year history. The Foundation, together with Bay Area Blacks in Philanthropy and Northern California Grantmakers, hosted a fantastic reception at the Museum of the African Diaspora to share well wishes and good luck to our Bay Area colleague.

Photos by Aled Ordu.

Here we are in Denver at the Democratic National Convention, where there is so much going on it’s impossible to experience even a very small fraction of it!

Being here makes us even prouder of the Foundation’s staff and the work of its grantees. It’s clear that we have not only identified cutting edge issues to focus on - the green economy, educational access, and civic engagement – but we also have chosen the right lens through which to do all of our grantmaking, i.e., the impact of policy initiatives on low income people of color.

We know that many of our grantees are either in attendance or have influenced the conversations which are taking place here. For instance, we were delighted to have the opportunity to hear Maria Teresa Petersen, co-founder of Voto Latino, on a panel about racial, gender and age bias in the media’s coverage of the election. The panel and its accompanying research were also funded in part by the Foundation.

Speaker after speaker here at the convention has hit hard the need and opportunity to create up to five million new jobs as America weans itself from oil dependence and develops renewable sources of energy. Our Green Access program, with its focus on making sure that low income communities and communities of color benefit from this shift rather than be hurt by it, could not be more timely or more strategic.

Finally, we hope that this historic first of an African-American Presidential candidate will provide a perfect example as our BBCBI grantees inspire young black men and boys to think big!

Mitch & Freada

Hello, Everyone!  I am Tiffany Price, the new Grantee Advocate for the Mitchell Kapor Foundation.  I’m so excited to be starting on a new and exciting adventure to amplify and reinforce our commitment to serving low-income communities and communities of color.  Because we want to work more closely with our grantee organizations in new and strategic ways and also seek to help build grantees’ organizational capacity, my position as Grantee Advocate was born.  The details of my role here are not all defined, but the general job description involves doing whatever I can to help our grantee organizations do their work more effectively and efficiently.

Over the next few months, I hope to be getting to know some of your organizations more intimately.  In the meantime, feel free to introduce yourselves to me!

Greetings, community. Welcome to our new blog. Our intention isn’t to get us on the blogging bandwagon (which I think started six years ago), but to use this as a tool to share our grantmaking philosophy, practices, and processes. Two of the Foundation’s core values are openness and transparency, and we hope that this blog will allow us to further share what we’re thinking and doing. We also aim to post interesting and relevant news and announcements.

Each of the Foundation’s staff members will author posts, which we will post on a weekly basis (at the minimum). We encourage you to subscribe in order to learn more about what we’re supporting and trying to accomplish, or at least check us out at your leisure. As of now, we’re one of the very few foundations (that we could find) with an accompanying blog, so this gives us an opportunity to exercise our openness and philanthropic best thinking. My hope is that we’ll all learn something new in the process.