Mitchell Kapor Foundation Weblog

I’m excited to welcome Mario Lugay to the Kapor Foundation as the Associate Program Officer. In this role, Mario will be responsible for the Foundation’s national VoICE grantmaking and movement-building work. Mario will also work with Carmen on our electoral empowerment efforts in California communities of color.
Mario has an extensive background in civic engagement and community organizing. He and I first became acquainted through his work with the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation (FCCP), the national strategy and affinity group for philanthropy professionals involved with elections and other civic issues. Mario initially joined FCCP and the American Dream Fund as Program Associate and, in 2008, became FCCP’s first Program Director, where he served in this national role until January 2010 (and then we promptly snatched him up!).

Prior to that, Mario worked as the National Coordinator of Racial Justice 911: People of Color Against the War, consulted with Listen, Inc. to help bring a delegation of U.S. youth organizers to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and was the Development Coordinator for CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities in the Northwest Bronx. Mario has served on CAAAV’s Strategizing Committee and on the Community Funding Board of the North Star Fund in NYC. A native New Yorker, Mario earned a BA in political science from Columbia University.

We consider it quite a coup to be able to work with Mario. Please join us in welcoming him to the Kapor Foundation team!

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.

Yesterday I heard a terrific briefing at the Haas Jr. Foundation (Thanks Cathy and Ted!) on the California redistricting process, which stands to be a great experiment in participatory democracy or  a hugely controversial process stunted by our national polarity. Or maybe some of both.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran a front-page article describing the process and the need for a pool of candidates who reflect the diversity of our state. The article drove me to look closer at the selection process for the California Redistricting Commission, which will be comprised of 14 citizen applicants, some randomly selected and others not. Criticisms of the lopsided applicant pool notwithstanding, the selection process alone promises to be thrilling, kind of like a civic lottery. I even checked out the application, which is due on Friday, February 12th. There has been a last minute push to spread the word to communities of color; I even received a video message in my personal email from the Northern California district director of my fraternity encouraging brothers to consider applying if we met certain eligibility criteria required by Proposition 11, which was passed by voters in 2008 to create the commission:

• Are a registered voter and have voted in at least two of the last three general elections.
• Have had consistent voter affiliation for five years.
• Had no conflicts of interest as outlined here.

If you, dear California voter, meet these criteria and are interested in participating in a process that will shape the immediate electoral future of our state, you have a week to get your name in the hat!

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.

Just last week I had the opportunity to meet Bob Edgar, former U.S. congressman and current president of Common Cause. He stopped by for a visit while in town with Nick Nyhart, president of our grant partner organization, Public Campaign. They were on a West Coast tour of sorts, updating activists and funders on their collaboration work. So I was glad to open up the Sunday Chronicle and see an editorial discussing clean elections and the potential impact of  the Citizens United vs. FEC case now before the U.S. Supreme Court. A ruling in this case could essentially roll back restrictions on corporate giving to federal campaigns. Nick and Bob are great leaders in the movement to improve the integrity of U.S. elections as representing the will of the our communities, not companies. The necessary distinction between democracy and capitalism has gotten too blurry for my comfort…

I was also happy to stumble upon an excerpt in the Washington Post written by a former student of mine! Lanre Akinsiku is a recent IDEAL Scholar and graduate of UC Berkeley who is now a Coro Fellow out of southern California.  He had thoughtful insights on the opportunities and limitations of corporate social responsibility. Go Lanre! Go Lanre! Do the daggone thing! I’m so proud!

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)

Since Mitchell Kapor himself is a high tech guru, and he and Freada Kapor are concerned about voting access, it makes perfect sense that the Kapor Foundation would be involved with efforts to create open source voting technology.  But rather than have me spell it out, check out this article about the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, a grant recipient partner of ours, by the good folks at Wired magazine.

This evening I saw a woman out for a run wearing a tshirt that said “I {heart} People Who Vote.” I couldn’t see the logo (and was too rubber-legged from an hour of salsa dancing to run after her) , but the slogan made me happy! I {heart} these people too!

On that note, looks like we’re getting some traction and momentum around voter registration modernization (formerly known as “universal registration”).  Supportive editorials are raining from the sky: the New York Times, Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report,  Kentucky Courier-Journal,  National Journal, Indianapolis Star, and of course, Huffington Post have all run columns in the past month about the virtues of “automatic” registration. Let’s hope that – amidst the health care flares, confirmation consternation, and Gates-gate – the electorate is hearing the messages.

Thanks to Wendy Weiser, Director of the Voting Rights and Elections Project at the Brennan Center, for compiling these articles. The good folks at Brennan Center have also published a ton of terrific work on voting rights! Check ‘em out!

The month of May wore me OUT! So much going on – can I capture it in 300 words or less? Here goes!

On Tuesday the 19th, I headed to Denver for the FCCP spring convening, Shifting Landscapes: Exploring Civic Engagement Strategies, Partnerships and New Possibilities. These gatherings are always informative with interesting people, and this was no exception. I presented a brief historical overview during the session Turning Promise into Practice: Strategies for Transforming Antiquated Voter Registration Systems – a fired up name for a strategy session on voter registration modernization. Check out the slideshow (pdf) for more information.

California’s special election was also held on Tuesday. We were concerned about the potential (and realized) low turnout for an election with huge budget implications, so the Foundation made a grant to Citizen Voice in support of their nonpartisan Special Elections Project. In two weeks they reached over a million people! See more on their website.

I also moderated a panel at A Dream Deferred: The Future of African American Education, the annual conference sponsored by The College Board. Our panel, The Black Boys College Bound Initiative: A Philanthropic and Community Collaborative, highlighted the work and strategies of three of our grantee organizations – Young Scholars Program, M3 Education Foundation, and SACREA’s My Brother’s Keeper Summer Algebra Academy. Again, check out the slideshow (pdf) for more details.

Last but certainly not least, I attended a U.C. Berkeley commencement ceremony to happily witness my colleague Carmen Rojas as she received her Ph.D. in City Planning. Many congrats, Carmen! Or should I say “Dr. Rojas”?

More stuff next week. I’m going to rest.

Flickr photo by Mark Jarvis