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We no longer have to wonder what we would have done if we’d been around at the peak of the civil rights movement. Whatever it is, we will be doing it now. These words ring from our conference. This moment demands more from us. This moment demands we be explicitly clear: Black lives matter! This moment demands we say their names: Nina Pop, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade and remember Oscar Grant.
SAN FRANCISCO – The Youth Power Fund is pleased to announce a total of $870,000 in grants to 29 youth organizing groups in Northern California. The fund was launched in 2019 by foundations and donors that recognize the importance of youth organizing and its role in sustaining a vibrant, inclusive society. To this end, the fund invests in young people of color, particularly young Black and Indigenous leaders, who are creating the world they want to live in by reimagining and transforming communities and systems.
Conundrum: As a person of color leading a foundation, how do I deal with white staff who are demanding progress on DEI while simultaneously disrespecting, microaggressing, etc.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - The Bay Area Census Funders Collaborative (BACFC) is pleased to announce more than $3.3 million in grants to nearly 130 nonprofit community-based organizations to promote Census 2020 education and outreach efforts and minimize the chances that residents of the nine-county Bay Area region will be left out of the census count.
Last week we celebrated Black futures and explored how we achieve a multiracial democracy that centers Black people. Northern California Grantmakers (NCG) and California Black Freedom Fund (CBFF) have been scheming to bring something to philanthropy for a while. More than 200 folks joined us to have some challenging conversations about the legacy of systemic racism, how it impacts today, and how we turn the corner and build a democracy that serves us all.
All children deserve to have access to a quality education. They deserve to feel safe and supported in a place that exists to prepare them for their futures. Yet, for Black youth and other youth of color, this is far from the reality. Every day, Black children and other youth of color, some as young as six are being pushed out of classrooms and schools because of deep racial profiling. Across the country, Black high school students are twice as likely to be suspended as white students. In Oakland, while Black youth made up 26 percent of the Oakland Unified School District’s enrollment, they represented 73 percent of arrests. This vicious cycle continues to fuel pathways to prison and confinement, where Black youth are consistently over-represented, which creates additional barriers for our young people to realize and achieve their full potential.
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