East Bay Community Foundation Joins Schools Reform PDF Print E-mail
Takes On Grants Distribution, Rebuilding Public Participation

November 16, 2005 - Oakland, CA – Less than 24 hours after the Oakland Unified School District’s reform initiative unveiled growing support and progress at a lengthy public press conference yesterday, the “nitty-gritty” work on two issues vital to the reform’s success began -- quietly and behind the scenes.

In a tiny meeting room at the 77-year-old East Bay Community Foundation located next to City Hall, three of its 24 staff members were grappling with how to ensure the reform’s multi-million-dollar grants are well spent and how to organize a campaign to ensure that the trust between the school district and its constituents – students, parents, teachers, administrators, neighbors of school sites, businesses, and others – along with its donors, is well placed.

“Both of these issues are so vital to success of the reform,” said Foundation President Mike Howe.

President of the East Bay Community Foundation for the past 12 years and architect of the Foundation’s past and current involvement in civic affairs, Howe continued: “Ensuring the grants are well used is an important part of re-establishing the district’s fiscal integrity. Enhancing trust between the district and its constituents is part of creating a new dynamic for public participation in Oakland’s education system. Fiscal integrity and productive public participation are both vital to support educational transformation in the classroom.”

Howe and the Foundation have already agreed to manage distribution of private grants and donations to the district and to ensure the money is spent for its intended purposes. At the invitation of the school district, Howe and the Foundation are also seeking grants from other sources to change the very ways in which people relate to the district.

“We start with the notion that the distrust currently existing between the district and its stakeholders in the wake of the district’s chronic under-performance has rendered public participation in Oakland schools dysfunctional,” said Howe, a former university professor, dean and academic vice-president. “But that participation is an essential part of our democracy and so our goal is to reinstitutionalize it. The school district very much wants to see that happen and we applaud the district for making this a priority.”

Fortunately, this is familiar ground for the Foundation, which not only manages a $220-million portfolio of charitable funds and has decades of experience in grantmaking, but also has a history of working on important community initiatives.

“Our prospective role bringing together parties with diverse perspectives and facilitating their listening to each other and learning how to work together is, essentially, acting as a catalyst to produce change,” said Howe.

“It is very similar to work we have done for the past 10 years throughout the East Bay, bringing together government agencies, community organizations and others to hammer out common solutions on behalf of children’s safety and services, building livable and sustainable communities, and juvenile detention issues,” he said.

With respect to its role disbursing and accounting for private grants and donations to the school district, the Foundation will draw upon its current staff and work processes relating to grants management, including its current role as a “charitable bank” for a capital campaign to build a new Library and Learning Center in Lafayette. As for its role helping to rebuild public trust in the district, the Foundation is seeking a grant or grants from other sources to finance the effort.

“We’re going to invest some of our own funds,” said Howe, “but substantial support from other foundations will be required to be successful. When we’ve secured the funding – and I’m confident we can do so – we’ll identify stakeholder groups for involvement, determine how to reach out to them, and design the group meetings and individual meetings necessary to develop trust in the District and to facilitate people working together.”