Honoring great educators through Minneapolis Educator Leadership Awards
Portfolio Manager Lisa Moy reflected on the importance of honoring educators in her life.
Connections Create Possibilities
This is the story of how our foundation came to finance the purchase the largest commercial building in George Floyd square.
The story begins twice: Once in the summer of 2022, at an early morning meetup with a group of people from an organization with which we were exploring partnership (incredible people who hit a barrier to our shared work) at the intersection of 38th and Chicago in South Minneapolis. There were a dozen of us. We listened as elected and appointed city leadership discussed the intersection and then turned the mic over to property owners PJ Hill and Dan Coleman to tell us about their work as owners and developers on the Square. As the group disbursed, PJ gave me his number. I took it without any idea why I would need it.
Congratulations, EDTalks!
I remember sitting shoulder to shoulder with my friends on the Icehouse balcony at my first EDTalks in October 2015. It was a sold-out event with Peggy Flanagan, executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund-Minnesota and soon-to-be state representative, who spoke on “Knowing Where We Come From”, along with teacher Tom Rademacher and student Arreanna Whitley, who spoke on “Students Lead in Anti-Racist Classrooms.” As someone who had taught in Minneapolis Public Schools for the prior 14 years, this event filled me with pride and hope, both for the teaching profession and for our community.
No zombie philanthropy for Halloween, please.
There isn’t only one right way to be a philanthropist, but there is a wrong way. Here’s what’s keeping me up at night: zombie philanthropy.
Let me explain. “Zombie philanthropy” is a term (albeit an unkind one) for large amounts of money earmarked for charitable purposes that sits in limbo, instead of moving to public charities. The vehicle that facilitates this transformation from good intent into unnatural, zombie-life is donor-advised funds that are predominantly held in commercial banks.
Graves Ventures featured leader: Carla Godwin
Carla Godwin, Executive Director of the PERIS Foundation, grew up in a family with a legacy of both trauma and resilience. Having experienced the generational impact of family separation, she saw that systems sometimes fail those who are vulnerable, particularly women, children, and youth. Her experience inspired a desire to understand how we overcome and thrive in spite of obstacles, individually and collectively, and how we can create human centered systems.
Graves Ventures featured leader Kenneth Eban
Kenneth believes that public education should matter to every single person. Even if you don’t have children in the Minneapolis Public Schools, the success of the district should matter to everyone who wants this city to be a great place to live. “There are so many issues today, like public safety, housing and climate change, and we’re going to need our young people to be well educated so they can help us solve these pressing problems,” says Kenneth Eban, Executive Director of the Advancing Equity Coalition (AEC).
Graves Ventures featured leader: Kristy Snyder
As a 16 year-old, Kristy Snyder was forced to leave her home, and navigate the courts to become an Emancipated Minor. Kristy’s experiences as a youth have informed her professional passions, and she is dedicated to transforming what it means to have access to the system and the culture of power.
“Young people are cut out of systems that align with what they need. They are disconnected from school and work because adult-designed systems often operate without youth voice, and there are barriers that prevent them from accessing these systems,” noted Kristy. Both Snyder and her co-lead Quincy Powe envision a world where all youth are equipped to design their lives and to thrive.
Graves Ventures featured leader: Alondra Cano
After the Minneapolis uprising in response to George Floyd’s murder, Alondra Cano worried that gentrification and instability threatened to erase the Latin American community from Lake Street. Alondra, a grassroots organizer and former Minneapolis City Councilmember, has long been passionate about ensuring that policy-making is driven by grassroots organizing that includes local artists and musicians who can promote racial healing and drive economic sustainability.
Re-Introducing MELA: Spotlight on Local Education Leaders
”Reading hope on a page” - MELA proposals provide a glimpse of hope.
The Minneapolis Educator Leadership Awards (MELA) are a longstanding partnership between The Graves Foundation and Achieve Twin Cities that celebrates and awards the intersection of educators, leadership, and ideas in Minneapolis Public Schools Title 1 schools. In fact, MELA predates my presence at the Graves Foundation by quite some time – when these awards were founded in 2015 during the foundation’s earlier years (or chairs, per Bill’s first blog post), I was still teaching 1st grade.
Announcing Graves Ventures
We learned throughout this journey that ideas like PERIS don’t become realities without significant investments of time and dollars. We want to see the kind of change that comes with long-term work and partnership, and we’re thrilled to launch Graves Ventures to codify our commitment to these high impact projects.
Each Venture evolves in its own way but all of them are established within relationships of deep, mutual trust. They are time-bound partnerships, initiatives, or campaigns and are invitation-only. Ventures work occurs alongside and separate from our grant-making and was created as a means of supporting entrepreneurial work, risk-taking and innovation in launching projects, organizations, or solutions that otherwise would not exist.
Let’s Start with Chairs
2022 marks the Graves Foundation’s eighth year as a foundation – no longer ‘new new’, but in philanthropic terms, maybe ‘middle new’. Middle new seems like a good time to start a blog, having learned just enough to have a perspective and to know we still have a lot to learn, so here we go!
This blog will highlight stories we tell ourselves at the Graves Foundation that we wish everyone could hear. Sometimes those stories are embarrassing, but we’ll still tell them hoping to make a larger point about what it’s like to be a part of an organization whose primary goal is to run out of money.