All posts in Special Initiatives
Join Us at the Brotherhood Conference!
Please join us at the Black & Proud to Be College Bound Conference, our first convening for helping build college prep skills and a college-bound community for African American young men.
Short cut to registration link: CLICK HERE.
Watch our 2010 Annual Report Video!
In the spirit of being transparent, paperless, accessible, and plain ol’ fun, the Kapor Foundation staff decided to do a video annual report that captures the highlights of 2010 (our fiscal and calendar year are the same).
Many thanks to all of our community partners and philanthropic peers for continued solid work in pursuit of our common goals, fairness and justice.
If you’re interested in more detailed information:
Click here to see a list of our 2010 grants.
Get Out There & Vote!
The time has come to get out there and vote!
It’s been a crazy two years since the historic presidential election of President Obama. Since then, we’ve seen the passage of national health care reform, the rise of the tea party movement, and the economic crisis strike across the country. We’ve also seen negative campaign ads, local critical mass, and all kinds of parties to make sure we make it out on election day. And now the time has come. A number of our key partner organizations are at the forefront of local and national civic engagement efforts including the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, San Francisco Rising, Oakland Rising, and Voto Latino. Below are some voter resources, including two voter guides from the League of Women Voters & The Ballot as well as organizational voter guides from the Ella Baker Center and Oakland Rising
$250,000 for Aspiring Scientists of Color
The Kapor Foundation is pleased to announce a five year renewable gift of $250,000 to U.C. Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science to support the launch of the Berkeley Science Network (BSN).
BSN aims to strengthen the pipeline of students of color in the science disciplines where African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders are most severely underrepresented in academia and industry – mathematics, physical science and computer science.
BSN will create a vibrant academic and social network across generations of scientists of color – from aspiring high school students to undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral students, and faculty – by providing formal mentoring, networking, professional development activities and opportunities needed to advance in science.
BSN also will establish an additional connection between the University of California, Berkeley and the Summer Math and Science Honors (SMASH) Academy, a program of the Level Playing Field Institute. SMASH is a three-year summer math and science enrichment program for high achieving, low-income high-school students of color from the Bay Area to excel in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM). Through the network, SMASH scholars will benefit first hand from the experiential knowledge of Berkeley undergraduates and graduate students who have carved a similar path for themselves.
BSN will directly address one of the most critical domestic labor issues of our day, the development of highly-skilled, “home grown” talent in the sciences, while also creating a critical mass and community for students who are often isolated in their academic pursuits. We look forward to seeing the Berkeley Science Network launch and evolve over the next several years!
Grant Opportunity for College Access & Career Organizations
New Profit, acting as an intermediary for the Social Innovation Fund, is seeking outstanding organizations to join its newly-created the Pathways Fund.
The Pathways Fund is seeking innovative nonprofit organizations that address improvements in one or more of the following outcomes:
· High school graduation and/or GED attainment
· College enrollment
· College credit accumulation
· Living wage employment
Applications Due: October 13, 2010
To read about the vision for the Pathways Fund, please visit HERE.
For application instructions, please visit HERE.
$20,000 for Research on Hidden Biases
Some of you may have already heard that the Kapor Foundation is co-sponsoring an exciting new opportunity to gather research about how hidden biases impact our lives and behavior, particularly around perceptions of fairness and access.
Along with our sibling organization, the Level Playing Field Institute, The Hidden Bias Research Prize will be awarded to two scholars who have conducted rigorous research with compelling findings to contribute significantly to the field of hidden bias research.In Winter 2010, the Level Playing Field Institute will award two $20,000 Prizes as part of this competition – one for research on K-12 or institutions of higher education and one for research on workplace programs.
The deadline is rushing up soon, so check out the call for papers at: www.lpfi.org/news/HiddenBiasResearchPrize.html!
Grant Opportunities Still Exist
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.
2010 Program Updates
You may have noticed (or maybe not) a few new changes and updates on our website, such as the goodies on the Assistance & Advising page and the simplified grant application (in Cybergrants).
We also have important news to share about a shift in focusing on key partner organizations whose work is most closely aligned with our own. Please read the longer announcement here.
As stated, we remain an eager partner in helping to build equity, access, and fairness for communities of color.
Image from all-free-download.com
On the Road, End of the 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.
