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I’ll confess – the other day it was a bit hard to get out of bed and start the day. It was the middle of the week, a pile of Zoom meetings awaited, and the covers felt especially fresh and comfy.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I’ve arrived as NCG’s CEO on the shoulders of many others that came before me. Two of the strongest shoulders belong to my first professional mentor and a heavyweight in philanthropic circles, Joe Brooks. During my seventeen years as a work partner and friend at The San Francisco Foundation and then PolicyLink, I learned more from him than I could ever adequately describe. He had a habit of saying things that were increasingly profound the more you thought about them. One of those sayings was, “how much do you need to know to act?”, often dropped in a setting surrounded by other foundation colleagues where he was about to propose bold action to engage some of the Bay Area’s most vexing social challenges
I connected with Tanir Ami, CEO of the CARESTAR Foundation, and Michael Heil, Board Chair, during the final week of NCG’s learning series Unconscious Whiteness for Board Members & Trustees, where a cohort of 15 white-identifying board members and trustees came together to learn. We discussed their motivation for participating, the challenges and opportunities CARESTAR has encountered in attempting to center racial equity, and what’s next in manifesting their commitment. The conversation has been edited for brevity.
Working in racial equity and social justice in the philanthropic sector is challenging because the “personal is political,” and there often feels like no break from our 9-5 roles. We don’t get to take off our skin or the grief we feel in our bodies from the years of oppression of racism that our people have endured.
Alice shared that in their NCG tenure, they are most proud of developing and implementing Racial Equity Action Institute (REAI), a multi-sector cohort program for leaders interested in operationalizing racial equity in business, government, nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. Because of their visionary leadership, we created a network of 100+ leaders who are working to move racial equity from theory to practice in their specific sectors.
Since its founding, Akonadi Foundation has focused on supporting power building and organizing to advance racial justice in Oakland and around the state. In 2000, a year after Akonadi Foundation was launched, California voters approved Proposition 21, which targeted young people of color. Under Prop. 21, many 14-year-olds could be tried as adults rather than in juvenile court, and 16-year olds could be incarcerated in adult prisons. At Akonadi Foundation, we were inspired by the activism and efforts of youth advocates and youth-led groups against this racist ballot measure.
The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust—an Indigenous women-led trust that facilitates the return of Indigenous land in the Bay Area—recently initiated a call to action to philanthropic institutions to pay institutional Shuumi Land Tax.