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We recently lost a powerhouse in our field. Gwen Walden was the Senior Managing Director at Arabella Advisors' San Francisco office. She had a long history in our community and sector serving on the Boards of the East Bay Community Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, and the Breast Cancer Fund.
This past week, the award-winning hip hop artist and actor Common went behind the scenes in Southern California to better understand our nation’s prison pipeline, and learn from people whose lives are profoundly affected by it both on the inside and the outside.
California Criminal Justice Funders Group is honored to welcome our newest Steering Committee member: Sabina Gonzalez-Eraña, Senior Program Manager with The California Endowment. We are excited to learn from and alongside Sabina. Learn more about her below!
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
When I started at Hirsch Philanthropy Partners, I had a few impressions. First, I was sensing a desire for big change in Bay Area philanthropy that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I was engaging in conversations about race, power and decision making, which were the kinds of conversations I was having previously in the nonprofit space. I also discovered that several Bay Area grantmakers were already doing grantmaking differently, bringing diverse communities closer to the center of their work and challenging power dynamics. It felt like a ripe time for change.
This month, President and CEO Dwayne S. Marsh has officially taken the reins from Steve Barton and Phuong Quach, senior staff who’ve served as NCG’s interim leaders for the past six months. The three took turns answering questions about the moment in which we find ourselves and the possibilities ahead. As the interview was drawing to a close, Dwayne paused to check if we were going to address race explicitly. And so, signaling the new future into which we are stepping, we did.
When we ask our grantees what they want for themselves, their families, and their communities, they often say one word: safety. That is why – during a time when the national conversation on solutions to harm is embroiled in heated debate – our guiding star continues to be organizing towards interventions that center safety outside of the carceral punishment system.