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Join us in welcoming Gina Peralta to the CCJFG Steering Committee! Gina Peralta is a program officer with the Human Rights program at the Heising-Simons Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation in 2019, Gina served as the director of site management at The W. Haywood Burns Institute (the Burns Institute), a national nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing racial and ethnic equity in the justice system by creating community-based alternatives to system involvement.
San Francisco, CA -- Northern California Grantmakers today released a REPORT examining the effects of the 2017 North Bay Fires on the arts communities in three counties. Commissioned with funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the report finds that artists have been profoundly impacted by the fires, due to physical and economic loss as well as emotional trauma, with the impact of the fires disproportionately felt among arts organizations serving communities of color in the region.
Summary
NCG’s sustainers recognize that philanthropy can and must do better. Our sustainers support and bolster NCG’s efforts to deliver programs and offerings that intentionally gather people, lift up effective practices that mobilize the field, and transform philanthropy as a whole to advance racial equity in our region. Additionally, this support gives NCG the opportunity to go deeper, explore new ideas, adapt when necessary, and to experiment with transformative approaches.
Trans leaders need the spaciousness–many of us understand to be provided by sufficient resourcing–to be able to dream even bigger. As funders, we must understand, now is not the time to center our individual agendas; we cannot focus on single program areas, issues, and strategies, or tepid expansion of portfolios. The Right continues to fund for the long haul, and progressive philanthropy needs to expand our funding and our imagination. If we are working toward equity, we must be steadfast in resourcing trans leaders committed to, and creating long-term strategies for, trans people to live with self-determination and full autonomy.
Achieving racial equity and sustaining a viable democracy go hand in hand. NCG defines democracy as the processes, systems, and structures for historically marginalized and underrepresented community members to participate in a political system that fulfills the promise of an equitable multi-racial society. Northern California is a region that can model this approach, ensuring that people of color and other communities historically underrepresented and marginalized in our political process fully engage in the democratic process.
Philanthropy brings a special appetite for innovation and has the capacity for greater risk-taking – and those stances are needed at this moment to preserve affordable housing. When affordable housing is destroyed – through neglect and disinvestment, demolition, increased rents - people lose their homes, neighborhoods lose community, and the region becomes a more congested and less interesting place.