All posts in Social Justice

For the past two weeks I’ve vacillated between glee, optimism, overwhelmedness, and disappointment around the Occupy movement.

I firmly support (my interpretation of) Occupy’s core tenets – holding financial institutions accountable for their role in exacerbating the economic meltdown, establishing a more just system for generating revenues that will support our domestic well-being, and disentangling corporate and private wealth from their stranglehold on our democracy. Those things are no-brainers.

Yet, as with many blossoming social movements, there are certainly nuances around Occupy’s strategy and tactics that need clarifying. How can those who can’t strike, who can’t (or won’t) camp out, or can’t sign online petitions participate in what could become the defining movement of a generation? How do we channel the rage (or opportunistic anarchy) into a disciplined, accessible, provocative force for change? It burned me up to watch the enormous goodwill and community-spiritedness of Occupy Oakland’s high points be vandalized and tear-gassed before the eyes of the world.

What are we going to do??

I’ve certainly learned a good deal from some of our key partner organizations that have played a vital role in Bay Area Occupy movements: APEN, Ella Baker Center, Causa Justa:: Just Cause, and EBASE. And next week, Van Jones will speak to a group of  local funders about philanthropy’s role in supporting social movements. I certainly look forward to learning from his expansive vision and experience.

These are questions and issues that must be addressed. Occupy’s autumn vs. Occupy’s fall lies in the balance.

The Mitchell Kapor Foundation is looking forward to celebrating 15 years of inspired work and impact by the Ella Baker Center, as well as to celebrating this year’s Ellas award winners, Favianna Rodriguez (among other things, the artist responsible for the murals at the Kapor Center’s Oakland site), APEN (a Kapor Foundation key grant partner), and Akaya Windwood, President of the Rockwood Leadership Institute.

We hope to see many of you there!

Ella Baker Center’s Anniversary Celebration and Award Ceremony

This year’s Ellas will feature a Community Reception, Art Exhibit of works by Favianna Rodriguez, our Awards Dinner, the announcement of the 2011 Van Jones Scholarship Winner, and much more.

WHEN: Thursday, September 22, 2011. 6:00 – 9:30 PM
WHERE: Oakland Marriot City Center, 1001 Broadway, Oakland

The 2011 Ellas also marks our 15th Anniversary of giving people the skills and opportunities to work together to strengthen our communities so that all of us can thrive.

The Annual Ella Awards Dinner will honor social change leaders whose inspiring and ground-breaking achievements build community strength and promote peace, justice and opportunity. People-powered action, driven by hope and the belief thatthings can and should be better, is how change happens.

In the spirit of twitter’s #FollowFriday, here’s one from me.

We at the Kapor Foundation know Jordan Thierry well from his role as staff member of the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation. But for the past 5 years, he’s also been director of the Black Fatherhood Project.

Most recently featured on the Open Society Foundations’ website, the Project is both a film and a nonprofit organization working to uplift a historical and present-day exploration and conversation about fatherhood in Black America. Ultimately, it will provide ”insight on how communities can come together to ensure the power of a father’s love is not lost on America’s Black children.”

As my colleague Justin Davis says about this project, “black men, fathers in particular, play an important role in the black family and within black culture. It is necessary that we understand the context for which this is so and why black fathers will have an even more significant role in the progression of the black community.”

This Friday and moving forward, you can follow Jordan and The Black Fatherhood Project by signing up for updates on his website, http://blackfatherhoodproject.com/?page_id=133.

Have a great weekend!

Today was Carmen Rojas’ last day at the Kapor Foundation. Her exuberance and steadfast dedication to social justice will certainly be missed by her colleagues. We wish Carmen well in her new endeavors and look forward to seeing her new justice work take shape.

I wanted to share more information on our grantmaking plans during this transition.

We will continue our Green Access and VoICE grantmaking, although we are delaying new conversations about grant support until the fall. We’re going to re-set our grant request deadlines to October 31st for any remaining 2011 requests and December 15th for requests to be considered in early January 2012. This will help us to firm up our program direction and staffing. Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause in your development planning.

For Fall cluster key partner organizations, final reports and renewal requests are still due by August 1, 2011. We’re prepared to make these grants in accordance with our original September timetable.

For grant requests that were submitted by the May 18th deadline, we aim to have responses by mid-July. Stay tuned!

And yes, we’ll most likely hire another program staff person after first completing an organizational needs assessment. Check our blog here over the summer for any announcement about a position search.

Please contact us with any questions.

Cedric moderating "Quick Wits" at FCCP's Spring Convening

Taking place in Portland, Oregon, the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation’s annual Spring Convening allowed Cedric (FCCP Steering Committee member) and myself (former program director at FCCP) another great opportunity to learn about the latest and greatest happening in the field of civic engagement and to do so alongside our philanthropic colleagues.

Among many things discussed, one in particular has been of particular concern – voter suppression as a point of intersection, as an issue where separate attacks on various communities add up to something more insidious.

All data points to a new demographic reality by 2045. It’s around that year that people of color are expected to comprise the majority of the population. By most definitions, a healthy democracy would demand a parallel trend in the demographic composition of the electorate and of who votes.

This, though, isn’t the way our country is moving forward. There’s a fight right now over the composition of our electorate, both directly and less so. Here are three arenas where those fights are taking place and recent links to learn a little more about each:

• Voter ID Laws and the Voter Fraud Bogeyman – “How States are Rigging the 2012 Election” by EJ Dionne in the Washington Post
• Mass Incarceration within the U.S., namely 1 in 15 African American males ages 18 & older (combine this with voting laws disenfranchising formerly incarcerated individuals) – “[Infographic] Combating Mass Incarceration – The Facts,” ACLU
• Criminalization of Immigrants (combine this with denial of citizenship status) – “Immigrants for Sale” Video, Cuentame

The prospect of an increasingly unrepresentative electorate raises large questions, including for me: how does the ratio of residents to eligible voters, particularly if these attacks continue and succeed, compare historically? How does the ratio of residents to eligible voters compare across countries? Given the answers to these questions, how will people and parties respond to the implications of these numbers? How will they respond to the implications about what the numbers say about who we are as a country, where we’re headed and how and by whom our country will be governed?

Yes! We’re very happy to be among the initial co-signers of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy‘s new campaign, Philanthropy’s Promise, which impels grantmaking institutions to commit “at least half their grant dollars for the intended benefit of underserved communities, broadly defined, and at least one quarter of their grant dollars for systemic change efforts involving advocacy, community organizing and civic engagement.” Not only will this commitment help to channel grant dollars to communities most in need, it also offers a smart strategy for helping to maximize philanthropy’s collective impact! The Kapor Foundation is proud to join the 60+ other grantmakers, including many of our Bay Area colleagues, who have made this commitment.

Learn more about the initiative here: PhilanthropysPromise.org!

Read our statement here (pdf): Kapor Foundation’s Commitment

Tech innovator, entrepreneur, and founder of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, Mitch Kapor participated in a news conference last week in the nation’s capitol to address the spending disparities that exist between the California state prisons and the state’s public school system.  Joining Mitch were NAACP President, Ben Jealous; anti-tax activist, Grover Norquist, and several others.  They presented an argument on why spending so many hundreds of thousands of dollars on the prison system ($50,000 a year per inmate) is such a nonsensical allocation of funding given the current condition of the educational system in California.

Mitch states, ” Thirty years ago, 10 percent of the state’s general fund was devoted to higher education and 3 percent went to prisons.” This year, state spending on prisons is only 2.4  billion less than on education.  Obviously, there has been a change in priorities on the state level in the past 3 decades. Thumbs up to Mitch to participating in this convening and speaking to the seriousness of the situation.

As many of us now know, Arizona has long been a laboratory for anti-immigrant legislation, driven and funded by prison companies and their profit motives. Tonight I’m headed back to the state. I’ll be visiting for the first time since shortly after SB1070 passed, supporting a delegation of allies on a learning tour both in Phoenix and Tuscon.  I hope to share reflections from this trip in a future post, but wanted to call attention here to another Arizona related headline.

In addition to being a laboratory for anti-immigrant legislation, the state has also been a laboratory for public financing legislation, but in this instance, increasing rather than criminalizing political speech and opportunity.  Arizona did this through their Clean Elections public financing law and its matching fund provisions.  It’s the constitutionality of this law, though, that the U.S. Supreme Court is now considering.  Below is a an update on this critical case, McComish v. Bennet, by Marc Caplan, program officer of the Piper Fund, a Mitchell Kapor Foundation grant recipient:

Piper Update – March 28, 2011 – Marc Caplan

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument today at 10:00 AM on the most important public financing case the Court has heard in more than 30 years.  The case, McComish v. Bennet, marks the first time that the Supreme Court has considered the constitutionality of a public financing measure since the landmark Buckley v. Valeo decision in 1976, which upheld the presidential public financing system and other reforms. For that reason, it could have a profound impact on the ability of all levels of government to offer reforms which counteract the influence that powerful interests have over elections.

The McComish case challenges the matching fund provision of Arizona’s Clean Elections public financing law, which was enacted by voters through a ballot referendum in 1998.  The matching funds provision is “triggered” when non-participating candidates in an election spend above the amount of grants provided to publicly financed candidates and also can be triggered when independent expenditures are made against a publicly financed candidate.  In those cases, the publicly financed candidates receive additional grants. Through the 2008 election cycle, the law was used increasingly by candidates in Arizona, with solid majorities of both legislative and statewide candidates opting to run utilizing the Clean Elections law.

Despite the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in May 2010 that the Arizona matching-fund provision was indeed constitutional, the Supreme Court nevertheless intervened in June 2010 to block Arizona from making any “triggered” matching fund grants for the 2010 election cycle.  Following that action by the Court, many observers predicted the Court would decide to consider the legal issues presented in the McComish case, which they did in late November 2010.

The attack on the trigger provisions of the Arizona public financing law is part of the well-coordinated and financed multi-year assault led by right-wing legal centers on all aspects of campaign finance reform designed to empower moneyed interests with even greater influence over our country’s elections than they already have.   …

For the full update, including a summary of responses by public interest legal centers, the Brennan Center and the Campaign Legal Center, email Marc Caplan at mcaplan at proteusfund dot org.

This past Wednesday I had the honor of meeting with Oakland Mayor Jean Quan to hear about her administrative priorities and to examine how the City and the philanthropic community might work together. This gathering was organized and hosted by Quinn Delaney of the Akonadi Foundation, Nicole Taylor of East Bay Community Foundation, and James Head of the San Francisco Foundation. They invited senior staff from ten or so local foundations and philanthropic entities who make grant and program investments in Oakland.  While preparing for the meeting, I was pleased (and a little surprised) to find that over the past four years the Kapor Foundation made about $2 million in grants to Oakland-based nonprofits, many of whom are our key partner organizations.  This track record is important to us, as we want to be an appropriate and useful contributor to our future home community.

In her presentation, Mayor Quan highlighted the priorities outlined in the New Dreams, New Ways plan for the city, focusing on three in particular: transparent and efficient government; city and school district alignment and support of the most “at-risk” youth; and neighborhood safety. She acknowledged the complex challenges of implementing this agenda in the city’s current fiscal and political climate, but seemed completely undaunted by those potential barriers and prepared to move thoughtfully and determinedly ahead.

I was probably most impressed by the way Mayor Quan connected her personal journey as a social justice activist to her plans for governance. It was quite clear that she deeply loves and is committed to the city of Oakland. Most of the attendees, in our introductions to one another, also expressed a great appreciation for Oakland as an already-vibrant community with great potential. I left the meeting hopeful that as the government, business, philanthropic and nonprofit sectors continue to work together, we can bring about the changes and growth that the Mayor envisions. Go Oaktown! Go Oaktown!

Soon after college, I was taught and trained in a model of community organizing that had five core elements: base-building, campaigns, organizational development, alliance-building, and leadership development.  This last element, leadership development, has since been an area of work within the social justice field where I’ve found that I can both be incredibly inspired, but also incredibly frustrated.

So I was glad last Friday to attend Urban Habitat’s Boards and Commissions Leadership Institute (BCLI)’s information session in Oakland. [Read more about BCLI here.]  From the beginning of the presentation, it felt like leadership development done right. Many of the reasons why are evident in BCLI’s materials and on their website. I thought, though, that I would highlight two reasons that I hear us talk less about when looking at leadership development.

First, BCLI answers the question of exactly when and where their graduates will be able to practice the skills and use the knowledge learned through their program. It almost feels silly to credit them for this, as it’s why they exist at all, but I just don’t see that link too often. Groups that I’ve worked with have dozens of youth and adults go through their leadership development programs, but, and not to their fault, it wasn’t always clear where these members would then be able to all assume leadership roles.  Certainly the organizations themselves, with few resources and limited capacity, didn’t have enough open staff positions or even member leader roles available. Given this, BCLI not only points to the places where their leadership development program graduates can use newly acquired skills and knowledge, but also where all graduates of social justice leadership development programs throughout the Bay can now, if interested, play leadership roles and be supported in doing so.

Second, BCLI starts with the recognition of its participants, particularly poor and low-income communities of color, as being leaders in the room whose contributions and experiences will benefit their community, given the opportunity. This quality is one that has stuck with me from working with immigrant youth. It’s what I’ve understood to be the role model versus gang approach. While the former can provide a glimpse of a new reality for an audience, it could still also feel foreign and far off if their isn’t a deep connection with the speaker. The latter’s approach, on the other hand, proved instructive once we came to understand the appeal of gangs to Southeast Asian immigrant and refugee youth in the Northwest Bronx.  Rather than preparing youth to be leaders at some unknown time in the future, gangs, albeit tragically, offered responsibility and recognition almost immediately, allowing a place for them to apply and be recognized for the knowledge and maturity they had acquired growing up as the bilingual bicultural advocates of their community. Good leadership programs shouldn’t be gangs, of course, but I do think that they should include an approach that begins with recognition of existing leadership experiences and a trust to fulfill responsibilities based on this.

As someone new to the Bay area and to BCLI, I’m looking forward to learning more and seeing all that directly and indirectly comes out of this work.

* Title inspired by Paula Gidding’s book, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America.