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This past week, Joe Brooks joined the ancestors, bringing to a close a powerful life and career whose impact extended deep into Bay Area philanthropy, and well beyond. Joe’s legacy in this field is vital and active through the dozens of leaders whose lives he touched in more than five decades of public service – including my own.
This is not the New Year’s message I was hoping to write. There was a moment this fall when things started feeling like they might just fall into place. We saw progress on the pandemic, and it felt like 2022 might herald a fresh beginning. But reality intervened, as it tends to do.
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.
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
We're thrilled to share that we are expanding NCG's capacity around climate and disaster resilience. Katie Oran (she/her) has joined NCG as its first-ever Climate and Disaster Resilience Fellow playing a central role in supporting the development of regional and statewide strategies. Katie brings experience in climate adaption, disaster response, land use planning, climate justice organizing, and wildfire mitigation.
NCG is excited to announce Arron Jiron (he/him) as its new Director for Member Engagement. Learn more about Arron's experience, how it impacts the member community, and get to know him here.
According to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, philanthropy invests most of its dollars immediately following a disaster, when media attention is at its peak. However, less than 10% of our philanthropic dollars go toward reducing hazard risk and preparing our communities for disasters.