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Established in 1990, Community Housing Partnership (CHP) is the only housing agency in San Francisco whose sole aim is to provide permanent, affordable housing with comprehensive on-site social services to people who have been homeless. It is further distinguished by its core belief that people facing the problem must play a part in creating and implementing the solution at individual, community and systemic levels. To prepare them to participate, CHP offers tenants opportunities to develop leadership skills, engage in civic issues that affect them, and build strong and caring relationship through ongoing dialogues. In 2006, CHP started the Community Housing Organizing Project (CHOP) to help structure its community building work, strengthen its advocacy efforts, and improve its leadership development pipeline at CHP. By demonstrating the power of leadership development and civic engagement, it hopes to be a model for other community-based organizations that serve extremely disenfranchised people. The SSU Dialogue Center serves as an institutional home where dialogue training across all sectors and including a wide range of approaches can occur. From its base within the Hutchins School for Public Policy and Community Action, the Center provides a natural focus for educational training, while also making its facilities and services available to the larger community, including the commercial and public sectors. The Center co-sponsors and helps organize and facilitate several university-wide events and projects, including an annual symposium focusing on the role of dialogue in public education. Founded in 2002, Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) is committed to building a global movement of young people of different religions and perspectives working together to strengthen civic society and stabilize global politics. To that end, IFYC has fostered public support for interfaith youth work, equipped youth-focused institutions to hold respectful dialogues on religious diversity, and cultivated emerging leaders. Some accomplishments of the past year include hosting an international conference attended by 500 people; conducting an intensive one-year Fellowship program for 17 young leaders; engaging more than 3,000 participants in its “Days of Interfaith Youth Activities, an annual event held on university campuses worldwide to engage youth in cooperative public service projects and in dialogues about shared values; developing partnership roles with highly regarded think tanks and foundations, and increasing its presence on mainstream and social media outlets. www.draftinghumanrights.berkeley.edu Just Think Elana Yonah Rosen, Co‑Founder and Executive Director San Francisco, CA $75,000 three-year grant A national leader in media education, Just Think trains young people and educators to analyze, evaluate and produce print and electronic media. Since its founding in 1995, it has created and delivered in‑school, after school and online media arts and technical education locally, nationally, and internationally. Just Think's programs integrate critical thinking about the media into the curricula of core school subjects such as math, science, and language arts. By tying content and methods to the real lives of young people, Just Think inspires students to use different media to tell their own stories. Students have contributed to Just Think curricula Flipping the Script: A Hip Hop Guide for the Classroom, Hidden Heroes, and Senior Year. Besides its school programs, Just Think also reaches out to the community at large through film screenings, community events, and its Think Salons, public gatherings designed to encourage people of all ages to think critically about the media. www.justthink.org LeaderSpring Cynthia Chavez, Executive Director Oakland, CA $150,000 three-year grant LeaderSpring is a leadership development program for Executive Directors of community-based non-profit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through its two-year fellowship program, it furthers its mission of fostering high-performing organizations by strengthening and connecting the people who lead them. Each year LeaderSpring competitively selects 15 fellows—a majority women and people of color--to participate in its training. The program includes opening and closing weekend retreats, monthly leadership circles, customized professional coaching, and a one-week individual study trip to observe and learn about an organization in another city chosen by the fellow. While LeaderSpring focuses on individuals and their organizations, its ultimate goal is building strong communities. With its emphasis on authenticity, reflection, dialogue, and peer support, LeaderSpring is building a cohort of leaders connected by trust, respect, and friendship and a shared commitment to improving the lives of people living in poverty. www.leaderspring.org Mediators Foundation Mark Gerzon, Founder and President Boulder, CO $150,000 three-year grant Guided by its overarching goal of fostering global leadership for a peaceful, just, and sustainable world, Mediators Foundation identifies, supports, and connects visionary leaders from around the world to address critical social issues of national and global importance. An incubator for innovative projects for the past 20 years, it recently launched the Conflict Transformation Collaborative. Working in partnership with the United Nations Development Program’s Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Recovery, it will convene a core group of international conflict resolution practitioners to form an independent, cross-institutional learning community. This past year, Mediators celebrated the publication of Leadership is Global: Co-Creating a More Humane and Sustainable World. The book, a product of Mediator’s Global Leadership Network project, contains contributions from 22 international senior leadership practitioners on the need to increase dialogue and collaboration across countries, cultures, disciplines, and sectors. www.mediatorsfoundation.org Mobilize.org Berkeley, David B. Smith, Founder and Executive Director CA and Washington, DC $150,000 three-year grant Mobilize.org is an “all-partisan network” of young adults dedicated to increasing young Americans’ participation in politics and civic matters. To educate youth about the impact of public policy on their lives and, in turn, how they can have an impact on public policy, Mobilize published and disseminated widely the Mobilizer’s Guidebook, a 10-step handbook on organizing and advocacy. In 2005, it launched a dedicated Web site, www.youthpolicyactioncenter.org, an information clearinghouse that includes updates on state-specific programs and political tools for contracting media and politicians. This past April, Mobilize convened top civic leaders to discuss drafting a Declaration of Our Generation, a statement calling for a new citizen-centered approach to democracy. This fall it will convene a Democracy 2.0 Summit, the culmination of a five-month process of gathering ideas through a series of dialogues, focus groups, online chats and research to create the final draft of the Declaration. Mobilize is also planning youth workshops to coincide with the presidential primaries. www.mobilize.org The New School (a program of Commonweal) Michael Lerner, Founder Bolinas, CA $50,000 two-year grant Michael Lerner is the co-founder and president of Commonweal, a nonprofit health and environmental research institute. He started The New School to promote the ideas of influential thinkers and actors from a range of disciplines who are engaged in service to humanity. To reach a wide national and international audience, Lerner has engaged approximately 50 of these individuals in conversation. Visitors to the Web site www.commonweal.org and www.Conversations.org can access edited audio files and transcripts of these conversations. Besides organizing events in Marin County with “thought and action leaders,” artists, dancers, and theater performers, The New School also engages in strategic collaboration with partners with whom they find opportunities to leverage change in Commonweal’s areas of major interest. In the coming year, The New School will continue to focus on growing its audiences both on the Web and at art shows, theater performances, and music concerts held in the Commonweal Gallery and other locations in Marin County. www.onthemovebayarea.org PassageWorks Institute Rachel Kessler, Founder and Executive Director Boulder, CO $125,000 three-year grant PassageWorks Institute aspires to motivate, prepare, and support educators to implement its model for nurturing the inner lives of students and cultivating their social and emotional intelligence throughout an entire school district. PassageWorks’ brand of Social and Emotional Learning incorporates a variety of principles and practices based on experiential learning and dialogue. Working with eight partner agencies, PassageWorks recently launched a multiyear demonstration and research project in the Poudre School District in Fort Collins, Colorado that has a large, diverse student population. It is also now starting a secondary demonstration and research site with a school district in Missouri. In addition to developing its training and curriculum and documenting its practices through research and evaluation, PassageWorks is also currently implementing an outreach program. Through publications, keynote speeches, and parent education, it will promote discussion and learning among educators, youth development specialists, and parents regarding the relationship between students’ inner lives and their academic performances. www.passageways.org Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement Chris Gates, Executive Director Denver, CO $25,000 Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE), an affinity group of grantmakers, was formed in 2005 to stimulate interest and investment in civic engagement within the philanthropic sector. PACE defines civic engagement as the commitment to participate in and contribute to the improvement of one’s community, neighborhood, and country through such activities as volunteerism, community organizing, political advocacy, and participation in town hall meetings. With a goal of building a community of knowledgeable grantmakers committed to funding innovative and effective means of encouraging civic engagement and deliberative democracy, PACE has planned a series of activities to promote the exchange of ideas and information: arrange monthly check-in calls for members, conduct research on new approaches to civic engagement, convene four telephone briefings for national funders, host events at meetings of Regional Association of Grantmakers, participate in the Council on Foundation’s Philanthropic Summit, and develop a more comprehensive Web site. www.pacefunders.org San Francisco Neighborhood Centers Together Denise McCarthy and Julie Moed, Co-Directors San Francisco, CA $50,000 two-year grant San Francisco Neighborhood Centers Together (SFNCT) is a network of nine multicultural, multigenerational, multiservice organizations whose goal is to improve the quality of life for all city residents and, in particular, residents living in low-income neighborhoods. SFNCT works to strengthen the individual and collective capacity of its members and promote institutional stability through joint infrastructure investments, training, coaching, leadership development, and technical assistance. Besides advocating on behalf of neighborhood residents and agencies, it helps to build strong relationships through ongoing dialogues among organizational leaders, funders, and stakeholders, and shares informational, resources, and expertise within the Neighborhood Centers and the community at large. Among the items on its calendar this year is a Block-by-Block Conference to explain SFNCT’s advocacy work, expanding trainings at Leadership Meetings for Executive Directors, and developing a plan to distribute SFNCT’s film documenting the work of the Neighborhood Centers. http://nct-sf.org The Right Question Project Luz Santana and Dan Rothstein, Co-Directors Cambridge, MA $50,000 two-year grant The Right Question Project (RPQ) developed the concept of microdemocracy to describe its vision of people participating effectively in decision-making processes that directly affect their lives. Founded in 1990, RPQ develops and implements educational and training strategies to increase participation in the democratic process. Working with public and nonprofit agencies, it builds on the strengths of people traditionally disengaged from decision-making process that affects them. Participants in RPQ’s programs acquire critical thinking skills that teach them how to formulate their own questions, analyze how decisions are made, identify the influence of those decisions on their lives, and determine how they can have a choice in shaping those decisions. At the end of the training, participants have the knowledge, skills, and self-confidence to advocate for themselves, engage more effectively in decision-making processes, and hold public institutions and decision-makers accountable for their policies. In 2009, RQP will focus on its Voter Engagement Strategy for Election Day and Beyond project to train adult educators around the country to implement a new model for civic and voter engagement. Founded in 2000, The Hybrid Vigor Institute is an independent, nonprofit research organization and consultancy dedicated to interdisciplinary and collaborative problem solving in the areas of health, the environment, and human potential. The organizing principle for its work is the shared topic or problem that when studied by several disciplines—the social and natural sciences—has the greatest potential for a shift in traditional thinking. To encourage integrative learning and knowledge the Institute researches, produces and publishes topic-specific journals and books on its Web site; hosts symposia on specific topics; and develops and makes available on its Web site sophisticated methods, tools and technology to help researchers collaborate across disciplinary and geographic boundaries. It is also working to build a global network of diverse, top-ranked thinkers from the public and private sectors comfortable with cross-boundary inquiries. Denise Caruso’s book, Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet won the 2007 Silver Medal for Science in the Independent Publishers Book Awards. www.thataway.org University of California Museum of Paleontology in support of their work with The Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) Judy Scotchmoor, Assistant Director Berkeley, CA $50,000 two-year grant The Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) is a growing national coalition of more than 200 universities, scientific societies, science museums, government agencies, advocacy groups, media, schools, educators and businesses. Started in 2006 in response to concerns about national scientific illiteracy, the goal of COPUS is to increase public understanding of the nature of science and its value to society. Currently, thirteen regionally based hubs around the country are planning activities, public dialogues, and events to promote the Year of Science 2009 in which each month will be organized around a theme such as evolution, physics and technology, and energy resources. As a peer network, COPUS works to link member organizations that have common concerns but different perspectives and areas of expertise; leverage existing resources by sharing best practices, tools, and content to improve public engagement in science; and combine resources to reach new audiences. www.westernjustice.org World Café Community Foundation Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, Co-Founders Mill Valley, CA $50,000 two-year grant The World Café Community Foundation was established in 2001 to foster the development and dissemination of The World Café, a dialogue process introduced in 1995 by corporate consultants Juanita Brown and David Isaacs. Rooted in a systems thinking approach, the dialogue process guides participants to link and build on conversations as they move between small groups cross-pollinating ideas and discovering new insights into questions important to them. Hundreds of organizations in the U.S. non-profit, private, and public sectors use the World Café process as well as ordinary citizens. Currently, an international community is forming to use the dialogue process as a catalyst for collaborative problem solving, decision-making and action. The Foundation promotes its work through its Web site, resource materials and seminars. Additionally, a network of volunteer stewards is guiding and shaping the work of the foundation through such efforts as strengthening its core operations and infrastructure, hosting a global meetings of meetings in Spain, and developing the next generation of World Café stewards to collaborate with youth leaders from other organizations. www.theworldcafe.com |