Mitchell Kapor Foundation Weblog

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

To my great delight I stumbled on this article featuring one of our grantees, Hip Hop Caucus Institute, which was one of the headliners on the Yahoo! news page. They’re holdin’ it down! Check it out!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090519/pl_politico/22684

I’m still thrilled about the convening that we just hosted this past Monday and Tuesday, WHAT WORKS: A Post-Elections Report Back. We gathered representatives from each of our Project 2008/VoICE grantee organizations together for two days here in San Francisco to hear strategies that worked to increase voter participation and protect the integrity of the electoral process. Through this gathering we hoped to promote idea-sharing, networking and movement-building.

We organized the presenters from each grantee into six broadly-themed panels: Creating Movements, Strengthening Emergent Voters, Engaging Young Voters, Establishing Rights, Revitalizing Democracy, and Making Media Matter.  While the panel format made for two long days of listening, there were loads of rich and worthy information shared.

My favorite feedback is from a pretty forthright guy who said:

“Thanks for a great convening. Seriously, when funders throw these things, they can get a bit dry or canned. I’m really glad you didn’t go for a bunch of gimmicky conference tricks that are en vogue – like speed dating, etc. Just goes to show when u have some good program areas and real work happening, talking about them can be pretty interesting. I was able to network with some groups and will definitely follow up with groups to see if we can share and build our programs.”

We’ll post audio files, photos, and a special format summary on our website on February 10th so that everyone can hear WHAT WORKS. Meanwhile, I enthusiastically THANK all of our guests for participating and encourage all of them to keep up their vital and terrific efforts!!

At the begining of the new year, we wanted to give everyone a sense of our direction. 2009 is an odd-but-breathtaking combination of historic and unparalleled political possibilities and the worst financial crisis in most of our lifetimes. Needless to say, we’ll keep moving thoughtfully forward in the midst of uncertainty.

(Authors: Cedric – VoICE and BBCBI, Carmen – Green Access, Tiffany – Grantee Support)

Voting Integrity and Civic Engagement (VoICE): Formerly named Project 2008, our VoICE work will build on the tremendous energy of this past elections year. Because we have limited dollars to deal with a wide range of elections-related issues, we’re continuing to narrow our focus on several sub-areas. In 2009, we will:

• Look for opportunities to convene grantees and funders in meaningful ways in order to advance a sense of collaboration and movement.
• Concentrate on our particular interest in elections administration, enfranchisement (NVRA, automatic registration, etc.), and public campaign reform.
• Map out a strategy for possibly supporting journalism/media-related efforts.

Black Boys College Bound Initiative (BBCBI): We’ve had a low-key start of the initiative, which was launched nearly a year ago. In 2009 we will:

• Host a summer convening of organizations working with young black men on collegiate goals.
• Assess the possibilities of a second phase of BBCBI focusing on college-level recruitment and retention programs.
• Continue to work with a smaller cohort of grantees on basic college preparedness strategies.
  

Green Access: With a new administration entering office and a wide-range of actors engaging in Green debates, our Green Access granting area is looking forward to positioning ourselves, in partnership with our grantees, to be at the forefront of the exciting transformations ahead. In 2009, we will:

• Establish learning communities with our grantees in order to encourage collaboration, increased understanding, and movement building.
• Clearly define Green Jobs and push for a standard definition to make sure the labor and green components maintain integrity and benefit communities of color and low-income communities.
• Build alliances with our private-sector and investment partners in order to increase investment and explore the challenges of these relationships.
• Position our grantees to be leaders of national debates around climate change, green jobs, and healthy and sustainable lifestyles.

Photo from AFL-CIO blog 2008.

Grantee Support: The current financial crisis makes helping grantees with organizational development, problem solving, and crisis management a very important one. In 2009, we will:

• Develop a formal capacity building strategy to foster deeper communication with grantee organizations and to better help them meet critical needs.
• Work more closely with intermediaries, technical assistance providers, and other foundations that support capacity building work to make sure the Foundation best leverages its resources and provides information to grantees as efficiently as possible.
• Create more opportunities for grantee organizations to share experiences across all of our program areas.

Photo from Fieldstone Alliance.

Wow. I’m stunned. Elated. Much has been written already, so there’s little need for me to babble on, but I’m tremendously happy about the new incoming administration. Moreover, I’m deeply proud of our grantee and partner organizations and the various roles that they have played in helping to prompt the massive voter turnout and monitoring of the electoral process. We’ll soon be able to have a measure of effectiveness of their work as organizations begin to sort out their voter participation data. I can’t wait!

Sure, we as a nation still have a ways to go with respect to smooth elections administration, since elections oversight varies greatly from county to county. I’m factoring this issue into the Foundation’s grantmaking priorities for 2009. It isn’t too early to work on improving on our electoral processes now that voting is in vogue again!

On a strictly personal level, I’m mad and disappointed about the passage of Prop. 8, the latest in a series of mean-spirited, progress-limiting initiatives written into law (remember 187, 209, 227, and 22?). I continue to question the role – or even the legitimacy – of public policy making by mass balloting, particularly in today’s money and media driven campaigns.