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)!

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.

I feel quite fortunate to have role models and other professional peers whom I admire in the broader philanthropic and civic engagement movements. Thomasina Williams is one of these people. She’s the Program Officer for Democracy, Rights and Justice Program at the Ford Foundation and has a rich herstory as a civil rights attorney and legal advocate for social justice. We met through the Funders Committee for Civic Engagement, where she serves on the Steering Committee. More than once I’ve asked myself, when at the crossroads of a grantmaking dilemma, “What would Thomasina do?” I trust her vision and observations about the power dynamics inherent to electoral politics and what marginalized communities must do in order to break our elections processes free from the stranglehold of big money.

A conversation with Thomasina last week gave me the following inspiration: we must push beyond “diversity.” We’ve heard it used as lingo to indicate that people were at least *considering* the racial/ethnic/gender makeup of a particular entity. Yet, superficial treatment of representation doesn’t ensure that people’s voices, experiences, and opinions are taken into consideration during decision-making processes. Diversity in and of itself does not guarantee that pluralism is woven into setting policy or direction.

If we’re going to really embrace this nation’s diverse demographics, we also have to be willing to build our institutions that are inclusive from the beginning. And if they aren’t inclusive from the beginning, they are doggedly determined to have appropriate representation on the staff and board.  “We’re thinking about it” is so 1987. Do it. And – to borrow another inspiration from the intrepid Ludovic Blain, if orgs aren’t inclusive and don’t have appropriate representation, stop claiming to be diverse or represent diverse communities. Tokenism doesn’t count. Having racial and gender castes by job level (from executive leadership to support staff) doesn’t either.

We’ve made great progress in this nation; I remain cautiously optimistic that we can get even closer to the American ideal of “liberty and justice for all.” For real.

Yes, it’s true that we’ve been falling off with our blog entries. As some of you have already heard first hand, we’re (hopefully) in the final stages of our program planning for 2010, which we started in earnest last July.

When this grantmaking program structure was launched in August 2007, we decided to learn about and participate in the respective program arenas, green justice and civic engagement, by meeting key players and supporting promising work by effective organizations. This learning process would allow us to evaluate our work and make better decisions about how to better target our resources and efforts for the long haul in the progressive movement. In trying to maintain the equilibrium between our capacity, our interests, and the revenue available for grantmaking and programs (which was cramped by the economic recession, of course), this may mean that we work with fewer organizations over time toward a commonly-identified goal. As a matter of fact, all of the supplementary research and thinking that we’ve done thus far supports that strategy. But our plan ain’t finished cookin’ yet.

By the beginning of December, we hope to have our 2010 program plans in place. Our three core program areas – Green Access, VoICE, and the College Bound Brotherhood – will stay the same. We will still have a general request for applications.  But we will most likely have other, deeper changes in store.

Please stay tuned and check back with us (via the website) in December about moving forward in 2010. We’re getting ready by spending more time planning and less time blogging!

(Artwork borrowed from thewritingloft.com)

Back in 2007, the Foundation worked with Blueprint Research & Design on a logic model and a corresponding program structure for our work. We launched our current program areas and grantmaking priorities on July 31st of that year with the intention of getting our feet wet for two years, stopping to reflect, and then mapping out plans to get more deeply involved in these program areas and social movements.

As part of the reflection process, we decided early on to set up an evaluation of our programs. We genuinely aim to be responsive to community needs, and sought the “unvarnished truth” that an externally-conducted evaluation provides. We were particularly interested in the efficacy of our interactions with nonprofits, and the impact of our support on organizations’ work and outcomes.

Now that two years have passed, we have collected a host of internal observations about what we’re doing and how to do it better. Earlier in the summer, Blueprint completed their external evaluation of our work, which reinforces many of the same findings and feelings we have about ourselves (btw, it’s hard to write about this stuff without seeming like a navel-gazer).

Read the evaluation highlights here. (pdf)

Many thanks to the nonprofit partners (formerly known as “grantees”) who participated in the evaluation and provided useful and honest feedback to us. It should go without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that we look forward to proactively incorporating changes that will make our partnerships stronger and smoother. And in the future, we next look to do an outcomes evaluation to examine what kind of broader effect our involvement is having in the community.

Painting by Robert Shetterly, from his Americans Who Tell The Truth series

I went to bed last night and did that thing you’re never supposed to do in order to get a good night’s sleep: opened my laptop, went to the New York Times, and started poking around.

About half way down the page was the news of Van Jones’ resignation from the Obama Administration as the Special Adviser for Green Jobs. Within seconds of reading the article, the sad truth about the limits of this presidency became very, very real.  I met Van briefly when I first moved to Oakland in 2000 and our paths crossed numerous times as my great friend Zachary Norris deferred NYU law school because he was so inspired by the work of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and the leadership Van offered.  Van is a true intellectual, an amazing orator, and the most down to earth human being you will ever meet.

Over the course of the last months, I’ve been a giggling skeptic of the power that Glenn Beck has over the state of American politics.  I imagined it to be peripheral, on the margins of American society, and at the end of the day powerless.  Today, I can’t help but think: What have we done?  As progressives, we have let one of our great leaders, activists, and thinkers fall and still the streets of Oakland, DC, and  New York are quiet.  As progressives, we continue to let the administration fall under the relentless scrutiny of Republicans and, worst yet, right-wing talking heads and assume that it will have little to no effect on the movement we worked so hard for.  What have we done?  And more importantly, what can we do to make sure this never happens again?

Can’t stop won’t stop: http://cantstopwontstop.com/blog/time-to-knuckle-up-on-van-jones-resignation/
Sierra Club: http://sierraclub.typepad.com/carlpope/2009/09/we-all-blew-it.htm