Mitchell Kapor Foundation Weblog

I’m excited to share the announcement for our latest position: Program Coordinator, College Bound Brotherhood!

This is a part-time (20 hours/week), salaried position with an excellent benefits package (health, dental, vision, PTO, life and disability insurance) in a respectful work environment – ideal for someone who has another part-time obligation or is enrolled in graduate school.

Please do not post this announcement on other websites without prior clearance.

Raj Patel & Cedric Brown

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, particularly in the midst of the holiday shopping madness, I’ve spent some thinking about how and what we value. I keep coming back to this question: Do Americans value consumption over citizenship? Believe me, these are not my random thoughts.

It all started with this story on National Public Radio about a 3-D television that would make the Super Bowl a ‘greater’ experience for sport fans. I turned to my husband and was outraged that advances in technology could allow us to watch football practically live in our living rooms, but that we, as a society, did not prioritize preventing voter fraud or providing all people with accessible quality organic food over this experience. It all seemed crazy.

Thankfully, there are people like Raj Patel in the world who are thoughtful about these contradictions and are able to offer some insight on how we can transform this madness. Raj Patel is what my graduate school adviser would call a ‘double-agent’. He worked at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and is now at the forefront of battling these institutions by calling into question how we come to value goods in our current economic and political configuration. In the ‘The Value of Nothing: How to reshape market society and redefine democracy,’ he asks a simple question: Do we really know what goods and services cost in our society? His response is no and that we really need to wake-up and smell the impact of not knowing this cost soon or we’re going to be in serious trouble.

In his recent talks and interviews throughout the Bay Area, he gives the example of knowing the cost of how and what we eat. One in five health care dollars in the United States is spent treating someone who has diabetes. We know that there are food choices that can transform the impact of diabetes, but we do not place a value on trying to eat well nor in staying away from processed sugars or fats. On the contrary, it actually costs more to eat better. He offers the solution of having a tax on goods that we know have less value on our health. Just imagine a soda tax or a juice benefit!  The world is already a little better.

P.S.  from Cedric: I’ve known Raj for about four years through his wife/partner Mini Kahlon, one of my former colleagues at the Level Playing Field Institute.  Lots of brainy pizazz in that family! I’m so proud of him!

Foundation Directory Online

I’m sure many of you have heard about San Francisco’s Foundation Center.  One of the Foundation Center’s key resources is their Foundation Directory Online (FDO) which allows nonprofits to electronically search their extensive database of over 100,000 foundations for relevant potential funders.  They’ve also added a new Power Search engine called FDO Professional, which searches through NINE Foundation Center databases at once, identifying even more funding prospects. Their databases have also been updated with a section called ‘Economic Crisis Information’ to let you know how the particular foundation has altered its funding strategy in response to the economic crisis.  If you go to the Foundation Center, they can show you how to use the directory, AND you can use it for FREE.  If you access it from work or home, you will need to pay a subscription fee based on the type of access you want.

Training Scholarships

In addition to the Foundation Directory Online, the Foundation Center offers a variety of training opportunities.  Did you know that they also have scholarships available to help under-resourced nonprofits attend their full-day training seminars? If you represent a CA nonprofit organization with a budget under $1,000,000, you are eligible to apply. The Foundation Center offers another way to save money as well.  They provide special discounts: if more than one person from your organization attends a particular full-day training, you only have to pay $25 for each additional person on your team to attend a particular fundraising course or $25 for each additional fundraising course you attend.

I encourage you to take advantage of the opportunities to advance your knowledge base, especially when you have excellent resources available like these!

Happy New Year everybody! Like many others, I’m glad to see the dawn of a new decade.

There are many things that I thought I’d never see happen, or that I’d be quite elderly before they did. Aside from the obvious and much-talked about one, I also never envisioned gay marriage being legal (although in precious few places, but still…). And as a native North Carolinian, I never thought I’d see the day when smoking was banned in public places in my home state.

During my childhood, tobacco was king. My high school is named after a tobacco baron. My grandfather, uncles, cousins, and stepfather all worked in the local tobacco company. It was steady agri-industrial work for high school grads with limited opportunities in the newly integrated/de facto segregated south.  I spent a summer sweeping the floors of a cigarette factory after my first year of college. And one of the nation’s fiercest basketball rivalries (go ‘heels!) plays out along the folksy-named Tobacco Road.

While North Carolina started to diversify its economic offerings in the 1980s, the tobacco industry still exerts a strong presence in the state. So imagine my surprise when I saw that, as of the beginning of this year, North Carolina restaurants and bars can no longer allow smoking (California fully enacted similar legislation in 1998).

This was a nice affirmation that change does come. And to paraphrase my grandmother, it “may not come when you want it, but it’s always right on time.” Let’s keep that in mind as we continue to work for equity, justice, and access during the coming year.

Happy New Year, everyone!  I recently received a short article called “Keep Up the Momentum: Use Your Year-end Fundraising to Kickstart 2010: 10 Strategies for Turning Your Year-End Fundraising into Sustained Growth in the New Year.”  The article was sent by Convio, a constituent relationship management software and services provider.  Here is a short breakdown of the ten strategies.  I hope they’re useful to you!

1. Capture email address for offline donors at events, through direct mail response cards, and through telemarketing.
2. Use multiple channels (email, mail, and telemarketing) to garner support – Convio’s research shows that direct mail donors who also get email solicitation give twice as much and renew at 10% higher rates than those who just get email.
3. Get to know your supporters better -  This allows you to segment your lists and send targeted communications and appeals based on their interests, gender, age, etc.
4. Segment your welcome messages and follow-up practices for the different types of supporters you have.
5. Be transparent – Provide regular updates via email, direct mail, and phone on how funds are being used.
6. Promote a Sustainer or Pledge Giving Program – Give reasons why supporters should give on a recurring basis or give more money and allow that money to be paid over time. Convio says that Sustaining and Pledge donors renew at rates 10-20% higher than single-gift donors.
7. Optimize your website home page by having a strong message, decreasing clutter on the website, and improving registration opportunities which increases chances to get email addresses.
8. Create targeted website content for your various audiences.
9. Make email newsletters more engaging: perhaps having two versions – one for prospects/non-donors and one for current donors. You can also give donors a chance to update their addresses or to share stories.
10. Tap into the power of viral marketing – Donors can help spread the word about your organization if you provide things like Tell-A-Friend links, personal outreach tools, and widgets that supporters can plug into their social network sites.

Hopefully you can find something in this list to help you strengthen your fundraising strategies.

Click here if you want to read the entire article.

(Artwork from beyondwar.ning.com)

Hi everyone! It’s been an exciting couple of months in the world of Green Access to say the least. We’ve been planning for the Foundation’s 2010 roll-out, following the amazing work of our grant recipient organizations and partners like Green for All and Movement Generation fighting the good and hard fight for racially and economically just climate change solutions in Copenhagen, Denmark, and we had our end of the year convening documenting what works in the movement for green jobs, climate justice, and food security in low-income communities of color. We’ve been a busy bunch at the Foundation to say the least.

Our end of the year What Works! zero-waste convening was a great success with almost 100 participants, 3 panels, and 15 presentations from some of the nation’s leaders in building a racially and economically just green movement. The panels were rich reflections of on-going work in our neighborhoods, across our state, and throughout the country. On the local panel we heard from people like Adam Kruggel from Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Community Organizing, which is organizing families to fight for a just green economy in Contra Costa County and Joshua Arce from Brightline Defense Project describing their strategies to shut down power plants throughout San Francisco.  On the regional panel we heard from Juliet Ellis from Urban Habitat describe the need to build political power by training our community leaders to run or be appointed to local and regional boards and commissions and Nikki Bas from the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy who has been working tirelessly to green our ports.  Our final presented the work of Nile Malloy from Communities for a Better Environment, which is working tirelessly  to extend local power to Sacramento in order to shape and inform California’s toxics exposure policy and  Jakada Imani from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights highlight the organization’s ability to inform and shape the State’s green jobs training program.  All in all, the day has been described as inspiring, innovative, and energizing.  In closing 2009 on such a high note, we are ready and waiting for the movement building and systems change to come in 2010.

Happy Holidays and we’ll see you next 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.

Hmm. Just came across this New York Times article, “Grab Bag of Charities Grows, Along with U.S. Tax Breaks.” The angle is that “Experts say nonprofits are skillfully exploiting the tax code’s broad and elastic definition of what constitutes such a charity…The $300 billion donated to charities last year cost the federal government more than $50 billion in lost tax revenue.”

I hadn’t before heard that kind of spin on nonprofit sector work, almost as if it’s detrimental to the economy (or am I taking the story too personally??). I’ll admit that I’m one of the folks who has occasionally wondered aloud if there are too many nonprofits – mostly small, local niche operations – for the sector to sustain them all. The flip side of the tremendous demand (last year we received an average of three inquiries/requests for every one grant made) and the “unusual” groups highlighted by the article (although doesn’t everybody know about the Sisters?)  is that people are taking the initiative to address areas of need. Seems rather like a red-blooded American truism: have a reasonably good idea to improve any particular plight? Roll up your sleeves, call your neighbors, and start a nonprofit. In other words, take action.

This article makes for an interesting discussion on the pros and cons of nonprofit entrepreneurialism. Please, discuss among yourselves.

Over the past week, a few job announcements have come into my mailbox. Thought I’d compile distribute them. Please send broadly to those who might be qualified. I’m especially interested in promoting the ED position at our sister organization, Level Playing Field Institute. Let’s find some great people for these organizations and efforts!

Level Playing Field Institute: Executive Director;  Education Programs Associate

Women’s Foundation of California: Development and Communications Director

Community Housing Partnership: Executive Director