Tonight, March 18, 2013 at 7 City Visions host Lauren Meltzer and guests discuss the growing impact and values of young philanthropists. Last year, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that three of the top five donors of 2012 were under 40. Two of the three live in the Bay Area. If you are interested in joining this broadcast and discussion, please visit KLAW’s website.
New NCG member the Rappaport Family Foundation was highlighted today in the Nonprofit Quarterly for their work fostering civic engagement among community college students.
Did you know that community colleges educate nearly half of the undergraduate-level higher education students in the U.S.? It’s probably news to most of us, but it makes sense. Community colleges are local, accessible, and flexible. They’re also relatively inexpensive; compare the $3,130 average annual tuition and fees of public, in-district community colleges to in-state tuition and fees that average $8,660 per year for four-year public colleges.
To Deborah Rappaport of the Rappaport Family Foundation (RFF), community colleges are also repositories of young people who foundations can assist to be more productively involved in civic engagement efforts on campus and in their surrounding communities. The foundation now has three years of experience in this work and it is sharing its findings with other funders and the general public to promote awareness of the civic engagement potential at community colleges and the appetite for this engagement among community college students.
In recent years the Foundation discovered that when it came to civic engagement no one was working with community college students.
In working with community college students, the Rappaport Family Foundation is focusing on a very distinctive higher education population. For one thing, a majority of community college students attend school on a part-time basis. Moreover, consider that 40 percent of community college students are a part of the first generation to attend college in their family. Also, 16 percent are single parents, and 12 percent are persons with disabilities. The vast majority of community college students—80 percent of full-time students and 87 percent of part-time students—work while they are in school. With an average age of 28 and a median age of 23, they tend to be older than students at four-year colleges. As one might imagine, then, some of their needs and concerns are different than those that many Americans associate with the “typical” college student.
These needs and concerns are addressed in the profile of Rappaport Family Foundation civic engagement initiatives: immigrant rights for community college students, a resource center for immigrant students, free public transportation for community students, voter registration services, etc. “One of the great things about this population [is that] they go to school where they live or have lived and they stay,” Rappaport notes. She says this makes their engagement efforts “much more community-based,” emphasizing “activism [about] what is affecting their grandparents and neighbors and peers.” That’s the point of civic engagement, right?
Read the full Nonprofit Quarterly feature online.
NCG member the Rosenberg Foundation announced the release of the second edition of Justice in California yesterday.
How do we define innovation? For the Rosenberg Foundation, innovation goes beyond new ideas and technologies. It means fostering new collaborations and surprising connections across issues and communities. It is fresh passion and bold vision. It is the ability to seize societal shifts and trends to bring new approaches to seemingly intractable challenges.
For this second edition of the Foundation’s Justice in California publication, we asked 17 thinkers, practitioners, and advocates from the state and beyond to share with us their ideas and strategies on innovative ways we can collectively work together toward a stronger California. The resulting online publication features a series of eight opinion pieces addressing critical social justice issues, with a focus on criminal justice reform and immigrant rights.
Read Justice in California online.