Mitchell Kapor Foundation Weblog

Over the last couple of years the city of Oakland has become home to numerous blogs discussing the pressing political, community, and economic issues of the day.  These include Oakland Focus, A Better Oakland, Oakland Local, and Living in the O.  These blogs provide a much needed space for everyday people in the city to connect to each other, engage in city life, and sadly fill the space of our lacking newspaper.  I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about citizen journalism- on the one hand I think they provide an important look into how different people live and experience the city and on the other I feel like they too often mistake commentary with in depth journalism.

That said, last week I was invited to be a guest on OaklandSeen and had a great conversation with Aimee Allison on the state of Oakland.  We had an interesting conversation on issues ranging from the city’s gang injunction to economic development opportunities for the city’s long term residents.  Listen HERE and let us know what you think.

Congrats to Demos, which was praised in last Friday’s New York Times for their critical public policy and advocacy work from a progressive perspective. Demos, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary next month, was one of our first grant recipients when we launched the civic engagement focus area in 2007. They remain one of our key grant partner organizations, mostly for their notable work on voter registration modernization and campaign reform.

Keep up the great work (we need it)!

If you haven’t already, it’s not too late to send in your census form and it’s not too late to remind your friends and family to do the same.

Do you already know how important it is for people of color and low-income communities to send back their census forms, but still need some talking points to convince everyone around you? Check-out Color of Change’s census website, www.colorofchange.org/census, to find out how much money each filled out and returned census form is worth to your community (for even more Census numbers, visit the Brookings Institution online).

Want to know what percentage of households where you live have already mailed back a form? See how your neighborhood, and every neighborhood in the United States, is doing at  www.CensusHardToCountMaps.org (courtesy of the Funders Census Initiative, CUNY and our colleagues at the Hagedorn Foundation) or 2010.census.gov/2010census/take10map/ (courtesy of the Census Bureau).

You only get one chance every ten years, so … fill it out, spread the word, claim the money, and build political power in your community!

Local update: Oakland physically divided in Census returns | National update: For all things census, see Terri Ann Lowenthal’s important, informative and entertaining Census Project Blog. And, the Ford Foundation’s Funder Census Toolkit.

Almost four years after Measure O was passed by 69% of voters, Oakland will begin to use instant runoff voting (IRV) for the city’s mayoral and council elections  this November.   We expect the move to strengthen democratic participation in Oakland elections by eliminating the need for June primaries, when voter participation rates, particularly among people of color and youth, have been as low as 15%.

Instant runoff voting is a voting system where voters rank candidates in order of preference, eliminating the need for separate runoff elections when one candidate does not reach a 50% threshold.  As FairVote explains, “instant runoff voting elects candidates who have majority support, accommodates voters having better choices (alleviating concerns about the dreaded ’spoiler effect’) and encourages winning candidates to reach out to more people.”  (See a video demonstration below.)

After successfully campaigning for IRV’s implementation in Oakland, one of our key partner organizations, Oakland Rising, and its four organizational members, APEN, EBASE, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and Causa Justa :: Just Cause, will be contacting over 20,000 voters to explain how IRV works in the lead-up to the November elections. As Oakland Rising Executive Director Esperanza Tervalon-Daumont testified before City Council’s 6-2 vote in favor of moving forward with IRV, “We will make sure that Oakland voters know what to do when they step into the voting booth on November, 2010.  Oakland Rising is ready.”

For us, the story of how Oakland adopts instant runoff voting and the impact it will have is one strong example of how election reform and community-based organizing strategies work together to ensure, as the Foundation’s wesbite reads, “that people of color are fully and proportionately engaged in civic processes (organizing and voting) that impact the creation of public policy, and that the integrity of the election systems that we use to select public sector policymakers are robust and trustworthy.”

For our funder colleagues interested in learning more about this area of work, join the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation this Monday for their April First Monday Call, Election Reform as a Strategy for Building Power in Communities of Color.

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!

Re: Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission:

The Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.

Hopefully this decision by the Supreme Court will create the popular and political tsunami needed to pass suitable fair elections and campaign finance limitation legislation.  Nick Nyhart, President of Public Campaign, wrote a compelling response on Huffington Post. Voter Action is even preparing a “Free Speech for People” campaign to push for a constitutional amendment in response (and be sure to spread the word about their awesome call to action video!).

Death sentence for democracy? We’ll see…

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.