Northern California Grantmakers

On May 22, 2012, Northern California Grantmakers hosted a special briefing at San Francisco City Hall with Mayor Ed Lee and children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman, Founder and President of the Children’s Defense Fund. The program, sponsored by the Rosenberg Foundation, Mayor Ed Lee’s Office, and NCG was a festive event that included guests from NCG’s membership, San Francisco government and school district officials, and non-profit leaders such as the Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial.

Ms Edelman, who was the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi state bar delivered a sobering, yet inspiring talk on the state of children in this country and encouraged everyone in the room to do their part to change the plight of youth, particularly Black and Latino youth, in this country.

Here are a few bleak statistics that Ms. Edelman shared:

• A public school student is suspended every second
• A high school student drops out every 8 seconds
• A public school student is corporally punished every 20 seconds
• A child is arrested every 21 seconds
• A child is born into poverty every 34 seconds
• A child is abused or neglected every 47 seconds
• A baby is born without health insurance every 87 seconds
• A child is killed by a firearm every 3 hours – more than 7 a day – and is killed by abuse or neglect every 5 and a half hours
• Every minute a baby is born to a teen mother and every 3 minutes to a mother who had little or no prenatal care. Every 9 hours a baby’s mother dies in childbirth. Black babies are 4 times as likely as White babies to have their mother die in childbirth.

Ms. Edelman, who was in town to share her work with The Black Crusade for Children, ended the presentation with a call to action noting that these statistics will only get worse without the help of all. The Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC), a program of the Children’s Defense Fund was organized “to confront a deepening crisis faced by Black children and is calling on America to take action against a toxic cocktail of poverty, illiteracy, racial disparity, violence and massive incarceration that is sentencing millions of children of color to dead end, powerless and hopeless lives and threatens to undermine the past half century of racial and social progress.”

Her appeal included four requests. That we stand up for children by:

1) Not missing the boat in achieving positive outcomes for youth; the time is now
2) Knowing that we are all in this together; therefore we are on the same boat
3) Not believing the naysayers who will tell you that the problem can’t be solved
4) Realizing that Noah’s ark was built by amateurs, not professionals; therefore we must not rely on leaders to fix the problem, but grassroots organizing efforts.

In the words of Ms. Edelman: “If we don’t stand up for children, then we don’t stand for much. “

For more information about the program, please visit NCG’s events calendar.

Erin Gruwell

On April 18th NCG member the Full Circle Fund will feature Erin Gruwell of Freedom Writers Foundation as part of their Speaker Series.

“Erin Gruwell has earned an award-winning reputation for her steadfast commitment to the future of education. Her impact as a change agent runs deep. So deep, in fact, that her story attracted Hollywood’s attention. In January 2007, Paramount Pictures released Freedom Writers, starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank as Erin. The film is based on The Freedom Writers Diary, the New York Times bestseller that chronicled Erin’s extraordinary journey with 150 high school students who had been written off by the education system.”

At Full Circle’s event Erin will speak on innovation, the state of our education system in CA, and how to improve public schools. RSVP at http://bit.ly/HvN0tU. Admission is free for teachers.

Event Details

When: 6:30 – 9pm, April 18, 2012
Where: Pacific Gas and Electric Company, 77 Beale Street, San Francisco, CA
RSVP: Advance registration is required. $20 Fee for Non-Full Circle Fund Members. Admission is free for teachers.

For more information, visit Full Circle Fund’s website.

NCG’s Snapshots of Philanthropy is a special year-long series that aims to better demonstrate the scope and impact of our members’ work. These short “snapshot” stories showcase the positive impact organized philanthropy has in northern California, and will be used to educate external audiences about why our members fund who they fund, and what changes are happening as a result of these investments. Learn more about the series and read other stories online.

Latest Snapshot: Akonadi Foundation

If California high school students want to attend a four-year college, they must complete a series of specific courses known as the “A-G curriculum.” These courses include basics such as foreign languages, science, history and higher-level math courses.

Unfortunately, only 17 percent of California’s school districts actually provide all enrolled students with the opportunity to complete this “A-G curriculum” and those districts primarily serve white students. As a result, less than a quarter of the African American, Latino, Pacific Islander and Native American students who graduate from high school in California are qualified to apply to colleges in the California State University (CSU) or University of California (UC) systems.

The Akonadi Foundation, a foundation working to build a movement to eliminate structural racism, provides long-term financial support to a wide range of organizations engaged in racial justice issues, covering their operating costs and allowing them to focus on developing leaders and building strength in their communities.

In 2005, a number of Akonadi grantees, including Youth Together, Oakland Kids First, Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership, and Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, were exploring ways to better align their efforts and promote student-initiated reforms that would address the growing achievement gap in Oakland schools. The grantees formed a coalition that worked with the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) to develop a Meaningful Student Engagement (MSE) policy to strengthen student voices and leadership in the district. This policy created a vehicle, the MSE Collaborative, for youth organizing groups to work with official student government leaders and come up with a mutual education reform agenda.

A few years later, many of these grantees were working on issues of college access and readiness and found that Oakland schools did not provide enough “A-G” college course classes for all the students who wanted to take them. In 2008, the grantees presented these issues at an MSE Collaborative retreat and the Collaborative decided to pursue this college access campaign. The grantees and school leaders conducted research about the lack of access to college requirement courses and presented their findings and recommendations to the school board. The Collaborative partners worked together to draft language for a resolution adopting the “A-G” college course curriculum district-wide, garnered support from allies, and mobilized student supporters for the school board meeting.

In June 2009, the OUSD board passed an “A-G” policy designed to align high school graduation requirements in Oakland with state public college entrance requirements – ensuring student access to the courses needed for college. The policy will go into effect in the fall of 2011 when all ninth graders will automatically be enrolled in courses required by the CSU and UC systems.

This successful campaign demonstrates the impact of a long-term movement-building strategy for educational justice, supported by the Akonadi Foundation, in which youth of color advocated for the creation of an official department dedicated to youth engagement within the school system – and as a result, were able to leverage the partnership between official student government bodies and youth organizing groups to win larger, more significant policy changes like the “A-G” policy and ensure its successful implementation.

Akonadi’s ongoing commitment to support the operating costs for these youth organizing groups allowed the groups to build collective power for students and pass policies that increase the graduation and college-going rates for youth of color. This campaign is being used as a model in other school districts around the state to ensure access for all students to attend college.

Read the whole story [downloads as PDF]

Read Snapshot 1: S.H. Cowell Foundation online.

Read Snapshot 2: Horizons Foundation online.

Read Snapshot 3: The James Irvine Foundation online.

Read Snapshot 4: The Christensen Fund online.

Read Snapshot 5: Sierra Health Foundation online.

Learn more about NCG’s Snapshots of Philanthropy series online.