Faculty | 2019 New Grantmakers Institute

Dimple Abichandani is the Executive Director of the General Service Foundation (GSF), a private foundation that supports organizations building power at the intersection of  racial, gender and economic justice. Dimple joined General Service Foundation in 2015, bringing almost two decades of experience advancing social justice as a lawyer, funder and educator.
 
Prior to joining GSF, Dimple was the Executive Director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law. At the Center, Dimple launched a social justice innovation lab aimed at generating new long-term approaches to persistent social justice challenges and providing law students opportunities to develop skills and mindsets including creativity, empathy, collaboration and social justice problem solving.
 
As the founding program officer of the Security and Rights Collaborative (SRC) at the Proteus Fund, Dimple managed a donor collaborative aimed at challenging post-9/11 Islamophobia and discrimination and restoring civil rights and liberties. Earlier in her career, Dimple worked at Legal Services NYC, first as a staff attorney where she represented low wage workers and later as the Director of Program Development.
 
Dimple currently serves on the board of Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees and has served on the boards of Asian Americans Advancing Justice- Asian Law Caucus, Forward Together and the Third Wave Foundation. Dimple earned a JD at Northeastern University School of Law, and a BA in English with Honors at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Oakland, CA with her daughter and partner.

For over 20 years, Kimberly has been passionately committed to social justice organizing and advocacy efforts that bring voice and power to youth, LGBTQ people, people of color, and working class communities in the Bay Area. Before coming on as the Executive Director for RYSE, Kimberly served as the Executive Director for Youth Together, the founding organization of the RYSE Center. Kimberly has formerly served on the boards of Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, Horizons Foundation, Youth Uprising, Astraea Foundation, and she served as the Advisory Board Chair for RYSE’s planning phase. Kimberly has also been a strong advocate for people of color and youth within the funding community and has served as a community funding panel member of the Women’s Foundation, Horizons Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, San Francisco Department of Children Youth and Their Families, Astraea Foundation, and the California Mental Health Services Administration. She is a former Rockwood Leadership Fellow, LeaderSpring Executive Fellow, and most recently a Stanford University Nonprofit Executive Fellow.

Jamie Allison is devoted to building a healthy, just, and vibrant society, one in which we work creatively and collaboratively to bring the benefits of inclusive community to all. Before joining the Walter & Elise Haas Fund as its Executive Director in 2018, Jamie helped lead the S. H. Cowell Foundation. She started there as Program Officer in charge of Youth Development in 2006. Her portfolio at Cowell steadily grew to encompass affordable housing and program-related investment management as she took the role of Senior Program Officer in 2012, then as Vice President Programs in 2016.

When not at work, Jamie keeps active as a hiker, runner, and frequent attendee of film festivals and Major League Soccer games. She was raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but feels at home around the globe, experiencing and volunteering in places from Benin to Peru. Jamie earned undergraduate degrees in Political Science, Economics, Spanish, and Humanities from the University of Tennessee and went on to receive her Masters from the University of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Her breadth of civic involvement includes serving on the board of The Whitman Institute, a philanthropy focused on promoting trust and equity, and serving as faculty for Northern California Grantmakers’ New Grantmakers Institute.

Meaghan’s primary work at the Moore Foundation focuses on bringing together diverse interests in Canada to resolve conflict and ensure a healthy ocean and sustainable communities. Previously, she was at Conservation International, where she evaluated community-based conservation and economic development projects in the Philippines and Indonesia. Meaghan also taught middle school environmental education in Missouri, Indiana and North Carolina, the latter through a fellowship with the National Science Foundation. She facilitated an ocean conservation funder working group in the Biodiversity Funders Group. Meaghan also served on the Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy’s San Francisco Bay Area steering committee and as board secretary for the Canadian Environmental Grantmakers Network. She currently serves on the board of directors at the Environmental Grantmakers Association. She was selected as a member of Council on Foundation’s Career Pathways in 2019. Meaghan is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Duke University, and Cape Breton University.

Jara Dean-Coffey has spent the last 25+ years working with leaders who hold one thing in common: a commitment to challenging themselves and their organizations to have a transformative impact on the individuals, communities and systems they touch. She is passionate about elevating our collective understanding of the relationship between values, context, strategy and evaluation and shifting our practices so that they are more fully in service of stated aims. Jara reminds those who work with her and her team that it is a joy and privilege to be of service and that it takes us all to do this work and make the world a better place.

Jara is the Founder of Luminare Group and the Director of the Equitable Evaluation Initiative. She holds a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley, a BA in Communications and Political Science from Temple University and a certificate in Organizational Development and Evaluation from Fielding Graduate University. She serves on the Advisory Body of the Center for Evaluation Innovation in Washington, D.C., is a founding member and Steering Committee Member of the National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers, and sits on the Philamplify Toolkit Advisory Committee as well as the Board of Directors of the American Evaluation Association.

Aimee has been working on economic justice issues for over 20 years, as a policy advocate, technical assistance provider, public speaker, program manager, grantmaker and direct legal services provider. Her areas of expertise include workforce development, public benefits, asset building and community economic development, as well as racial/gender equity and employment discrimination issues. Prior to joining JVS, Aimee worked at the Y & H Soda Foundation, United Way Bay Area, Transgender Law Center, Insight Center for Community Economic Development and Equal Rights Advocates. Aimee holds a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College, and a law degree from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

Charles Sidney Fields joined the Irvine Foundation’s San Francisco office in late August 2016. He has more than a decade of leadership experience in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, funding and supporting social change organizations to achieve greater impact.

He previously served as a Senior Program Manager for The California Endowment. There he was responsible for strategy development, grantmaking, and leadership activities in Southern California. He also co-developed and managed Sons & Brothers, the Endowment’s $50 million grantmaking and leadership program focused on improving the health, wellness, and opportunity of boys and young men of color. During his tenure there, he co-developed a $260 million public-private loan fund, the FreshWorks Fund, to increase access to healthy foods and spur economic development in underserved communities in California.

Prior to the Endowment, Charles was a grantmaker at the Marguerite Casey Foundation, managing a $8 million portfolio of grants focused on community economic development, civic engagement, educational equity, violence prevention, and family support.

Charles was also an Initiative Coordinator and Neighborhood and Community Development Fellow at the San Francisco Foundation, where he provided day-to-day management of the West Oakland Initiative. Other positions of note include: Social Action and Policy Coordinator for The National Community Building Network in Oakland; Empowerment Zone Coordinator for the Transportation Resource Information Project in Cincinnati, Ohio; and Organizer and Economic Development Specialist for Welcome House (Northern Kentucky Welfare Reform Task Force) in Covington, Kentucky.

Charles currently serves as the chair of the Edward W. Hazen Foundation and was recently awarded a German Marshall Memorial Fellowship to Europe.

Fields has his master’s in education and bachelor’s in organizational communications from Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Since 1993, George Galvis has promoted restorative justice and healing to transform lives. Galvis is the Co-founder and executive director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ, pronounced “courage”). He draws from personal experience and his indigenous roots to help young people, particularly those involved in the criminal justice system, become community leaders for positive change.

Galvis holds both a Bachelor of Arts in Ethnic Studies and a Master’s in City Planning from UC Berkeley where he was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar and Public Policy & International Affairs (PPIA) Fellow. He has conducted and published extensive, primary research on alternatives to gang violence utilizing culturally and spiritually based approaches.

Galvis advocates for at-risk youth, prisoners and formerly imprisoned individuals with children. As a board member of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, Galvis helped create All of Us or None, which fights for the rights of formerly and currently incarcerated people and families. He has led statewide advocacy efforts to transform punitive school and juvenile justice policies that disparately impact youth of color and has developed traditional rites of passage programs as healthy alternatives to gang violence. He also serves as the co-Director of the California Alliance for Youth and Community Justice (CAYCJ), a broad coalition working collectively to end youth incarceration, youth treatment as adults, and build community capacity for alternatives to incarceration that empower young people in California.

Galvis was a leader of the Stop the Injunctions Coalition, which became the first community organizing effort in the nation to fully defeat a gang injunction in 2015. In addition, George has sponsored numerous state youth justice legislation and is a co-author of California’s Proposition 57 passed by voters in 2016. He has been a keynote speaker and presenter at schools, lock-down facilities, universities and conferences throughout the country and abroad, including the United Nations. George has been recognized by the Bay Area News Group & Comcast as a Hometown Hero and is a recipient of the 2013 California Peace Prize from The California Wellness Foundation.

George’s greatest achievement is his family. He is a loving husband to Catalina Garzon Sandoval and proud father of three beautiful daughters and wombyn warriors in the making Mikaela, Ayacaxtli, and Quillari. His daughters and family inspire him every day to be a better man.

David Greco is a nationally recognized speaker, author and consultant on creating a more sustainable and effective social sector.  He brings more than 25 years of experience in in driving the growth and impact of social sector organizations.  In 2013, David founded Social Sector Partners to provide training and capacity building support to funders and nonprofits to develop a culture of sustainability that incorporates full cost, sustainable business models, and a focus on impact.

David began his career working on political campaigns before moving into the nonprofit sector where he has worked to provide access to education for economically disadvantaged youth, built community coalitions around improving the social determinants of health, and supported environmental education and wildlife habitat conservation. A fundraiser by background, he has successfully scaled programs, developed new services, expanded into new markets and business lines, and launched new earned revenue ventures.

David is a leading expert of helping nonprofits and funders better understand what it really costs for nonprofits to be sustainable and achieve impact.  He works with nonprofits on how to develop revenue and fundraising strategies that cover their full cost; and he partners with funders to adapt grantmaking practices to better support nonprofit sustainability and impact.

He created and led the Full Cost Project in California to increase the number of grantmakers providing full cost funding, served as Interim President and CEO for Northern California Grantmakers, was the Vice President of the Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF) for more than 5 years and Vice President of the Youth Leadership Institute.  He regularly speaks at national conferences, has trained thousands of social sector leaders on financial sustainability, and he has partners with the staff, trustees and grantees for dozens of foundations.

He serves on the Southern California Advisory Board for Opportunity Fund and was previously on the board of Social Venture Partners Los Angeles. He is a professor with Pepperdine University in the Master of Arts in Social Entrepreneurship and Change program and the author of "Think Money First! Ending the Culture of Scarcity and Achieving Real Impact.”  David served for ten years in the Air Force and Air Force Reserves and earned his M.A. in Political Science from Villanova University and B.S. in History & Politics from Drexel University. 

As Trustee and Co-Executive Director of The Whitman Institute, Pia draws on decades of multi-sector experience as an educator, facilitator, organizational development consultant, executive coach, non-profit manager, business owner, writer and speaker to advocate for trust based practice. Pia speaks and teaches on radically embodied leadership and trust based practice in many settings including Harvard Kennedy School: Center for Public Leadership, Ashoka Future Forum, Opportunity Collaboration, Net Impact, Council on Foundations, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, International Human Rights Funders Group, and Skoll World Forum 2017. Pia proudly serves as the Board Chair for the Center for Media Justice. She is on Faculty for the M.A. in Leadership Sustainability at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources as well as Thousand Currents Academy. She is an I.C.F. certified executive leadership coach, holds a M.A. in Education from the New School for Social Research, and a B.A. in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. Follow her @PiaVision.

Allison Magee is Executive Director of the Zellerbach Family Foundation, one of San Francisco’s oldest and most respected family foundations. She is the Board Chair for Northern California Grantmakers, a board member of the San Francisco Police Foundation, and sits on the Advisory Committee for Foundation Center West at Candid.

Allison previously worked for the City and County of San Francisco, where she served as a leader in strengthening services for system involved youth and their families. Her work as Deputy Director of the San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department includes the development of a national model for juvenile justice system reform. Allison also established a collaborative model for the city’s funding of community-based services that resulted in over $14 million in dedicated funding for violence prevention programs for San Francisco youth. In 2010, Allison was awarded SPUR’s Good Governance Award for her work at JPD.

Allison also worked for Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Office of Budget and Policy, and the US Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General where she won the Inspector General’s Excellence Award in 2003. Allison holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy and Administration and a Master’s Degree in Social Work, both from Columbia University. She also holds a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science from San Francisco State University. Allison lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons.

Sara Matlin is the Bilingual Counsel with the Alliance for Justice’s Bolder Advocacy Initiative in Oakland, CA. Sara empowers Spanish- and English-speaking nonprofit organizations to become more courageous leaders in policy change movements.

Sara graduated with a B.A. from Stanford University and a J.D. from Golden Gate University School of Law. She is the chair of the North Peninsula Chapter of the ACLU of Northern California and a founder of the San Mateo County Coalition for Immigrant Rights. Sara began her career in policy change advocacy in 1988. She uses her training and community organizing experience, along with her Spanish/English bilingualism, to broaden the advocacy work of funders and social justice organizations in California and across the country.