Fortifying Movements: Investing in Cultural and Narrative Power

Dwayne S. Marsh assumed the position of President and CEO of Northern California Grantmakers on September 9, 2020. He brings 27 years of experience in the public, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors with a career commitment to advancing racial and economic equity.

Dwayne recently completed a four-year turn as co-Director of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE) and Vice President of Institutional and Sectoral Change at Race Forward Race Forward. During his tenure, the membership network of local, regional, and state entities committed to advancing racial equity through the policies, practices, and public investments grew from just over 20 to nearly 200 participating jurisdictions.

Prior to GARE, Marsh spent six years as a senior advisor in the Office of Economic Resilience (OER) at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. There, he helped advance sustainable planning and development through interagency partnerships, departmental transformation, and funding initiatives managed through OER. He was OER’s principal coordinator for a $250 million grant program and led the development of capacity building resources that reinforced the work of pioneering grantees in 48 states and the District of Columbia. Under his leadership, OER prioritized equity as a foundational principal for its planning and investment initiatives.

Marsh brings to the movement his expertise and considerable experience in coalition building for regional equity and leadership development for policy change. He provides technical assistance and capacity building knowledge to equitable development initiatives that address continuing disparities in affordable housing, transportation investment, and environmental justice. Before HUD, Marsh spent a decade at PolicyLink, the national organization committed to economic and social equity. Before PolicyLink, he directed the FAITHS Initiative for eight years at The San Francisco Foundation, building a nationally renowned community development and capacity building program that continues to this day. His career has been defined by supporting communities traditionally marginalized from full participation in our economy and society to build power and leverage lasting systems transformation.

Ai-jen Poo is a next-generation labor leader, award-winning organizer, author, and a leading voice in the women’s movement. She is the President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Director of Caring Across Generations, Co-Founder of SuperMajority and Trustee of the Ford Foundation. Ai-jen is a nationally recognized expert on elder and family care, the future of work, gender equality, immigration, narrative change, and grassroots organizing. She is the author of the celebrated book, The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America. Together with Alicia Garza, Ai-jen co-hosts the podcast, Sunstorm. 

She has been recognized among Fortune’s 50 World’s Greatest Leaders and Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, and she has been the recipient of countless awards, including a 2014 MacArthur “Genius” Award. Ai-jen has been a featured speaker at TEDWomen, Aspen Ideas Festival, Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Skoll World Forum, and the Obama Foundation Inaugural Summit. She has made TV appearances on Nightline, MSNBC, and Morning Joe, and her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Maire Claire, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and CNN.com among others. Ai-jen has been an influential voice in the #MeToo movement and attended the 2018 Golden Globe Awards with Meryl Streep as part of the launch of #TimesUp. 

In 12 short years, with the help of more than 70 local affiliate organizations and chapters and over 200,000 members, the National Domestic Workers Alliance has passed Domestic Worker Bills of Rights in 10 states, the cities of Seattle and Philadelphia, and brought over 2 million home care workers under minimum wage protections. In 2011, Ai-jen launched Caring Across Generations to unite American families in a campaign to achieve bold solutions to the nation’s crumbling care infrastructure. The campaign has catalyzed groundbreaking policy change in states including the nation’s first family caregiver benefit in Hawai’i, and the first long-term care social insurance fund in Washington State.

Favianna Rodriguez Giannoni is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and entrepreneur based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom. Her work centers joy and healing, while challenging entrenched myths and dominant cultural practices. Favianna's creative partnerships include companies like Ben & Jerry's, Spotify, Old Navy, and Playboy Magazine. She has completed a number of large scale public art commissions with the City of San Francisco and the Presidio National Park. Through her poignant speeches, she has inspired audiences around the world including at the United Nations Climate Summit, Sundance Film Festival, Smithsonian, Google and Lush Cosmetics. Favianna's creative practice serves as a record of her human experiences as a woman of color embracing pleasure and womb healing through creative expression and personal transformation. Her signature mark-making embodies the perspective of a first-generation American Latinx artist with Afro-Latinx roots who grew up in Oakland, California during the era of the war on drugs and the birth of Hip Hop. 

A strategy advisor to artists of all genres, Favianna is regarded as one of the leading thinkers and personalities uniting art, culture and social impact. Through her thought leadership as President and co-founder of The Center for Cultural Power, an organization igniting change at the intersection of art and social justice, she has been instrumental in building a cultural strategy ecosystem that supports BIPOC artists in the U.S. She helped launch the Constellations Culture Change Fund, a philanthropic initiative designed to build cultural power by investing in BIPOC artists and grassroots art organizations. 

Favianna is a recognized climate justice leader, and brings her personal journey to the climate justice fight through her writing, including as a contributing writer to the best selling anthology, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson. 

In 2016, Favianna was awarded the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship for her work around immigrant detention and mass incarceration. In 2017, she received an Atlantic Fellowship for Racial Equity for her work around racial justice and climate change. In 2018, she received the SOROS Equality Fellowship for building the field of cultural organizing. As an entrepreneur, she has co-founded various institutions, including the EastSide Arts Alliance, a cultural center and affordable housing development in Oakland, CA. 

Favianna is currently working on a feature film about healing from generational womb trauma.

Rinku is a writer and social justice strategist. She is formerly the Executive Director of Race Forward and was Publisher of their award-winning news site Colorlines. Under Sen’s leadership, Race Forward generated some of the most impactful racial justice successes of recent years, including Drop the I-Word, a campaign for media outlets to stop referring to immigrants as “illegal,” resulting in the Associated Press, USA Today, LA Times, and many more outlets changing their practice. She was also the architect of the Shattered Families report, which identified the number of kids in foster care whose parents had been deported. 

Her books Stir it Up and The Accidental American theorize a model of community organizing that integrates a political analysis of race, gender, class, poverty, sexuality, and other systems. As a consultant, Rinku has worked on narrative and political strategy with numerous organizations and foundations, including PolicyLink, the ACLU and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. She serves on numerous boards, including the Women’s March, where she is Co-President and the Foundation for National Progress, publisher of Mother Jones magazine. 

Rinku’s skill at taking big ideas live is legendary. Since the 1980s she has been bringing racial justice to feminism and feminism to racial justice, and fair economy to all of it. She has mentored dozens of organizers, community leaders, philanthropists and artists through her nearly 40-year career, as described in a profile of Rinku in Brown Alumni Magazine. Rinku is sought-after because people know that no one is better in a crisis, whether internal or external. Her judgment is so sound because she has deep integrity, and the courage to exercise it while making, owning and carrying out hard decisions. 

In her current role leading Narrative Initiative, she is building a vision of true multiracial, pluralistic democracy, and helping organizers across movements learn how to saturate every story with their ideas.

Janet Y. Spears is Chief Executive Officer of Metta Fund, a private foundation dedicated to advancing the health and wellness of San Francisco’s aging population. Established in 1998, the foundation has a current endowment of more than $80 million and grants out approximately $2.4 million per year. Under Janet’s leadership, Metta Fund has pursued an audacious vision of an inclusive, connected, multi-generational, healthy and thriving San Francisco. She has established new organizational priorities and spearheaded innovative opportunities for collaboration in service of the health and wellness of the community.

Before joining Metta Fund, Janet was Chief Operating Officer at the East Bay Community Foundation (EBCF), a community foundation located in Oakland, California with approximately $400 million in assets. During her tenure, she oversaw development, grantmaking, communications, and donor services, and guided EBCF to a programmatically strong and financially healthy position. Prior to EBCF, Janet enjoyed a 23-year career at AT&T, where she led complex sales solutions as Sales Vice President.

Janet was appointed to the San Francisco Disability and Aging Services Commission in 2019 and also serves on the boards of Northern California Grantmakers, the Giants Community Fund, and the University of the Pacific (UOP), her alma mater. There, she is Chair of the Academics and Student Affairs Committee, and previously served as Board Secretary. She was also formerly on the Board of UOP’s Pacific School Alumni Association.

Janet holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Pacific, where she was named distinguished alumna in 2012. She also holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, and an Advanced Management Certificate from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Janet is a California native and longtime San Francisco resident.