Friday, March 27, 2009

West Coast EPIP staff tour

The EPIP Staff is on the road!

I am visiting EPIP's four West Coast local communities to re-connect with members, chapter leaders and other colleagues. I am joined on this trip by Sophia Silao, EPIP's Associate Director for 6 months now.

So far we've spent a couple days each in San Franciso and Seattle. In the Bay Area we sat down with an energetic group of emerging staff at the Tides Foundation -- one of EPIP's longtime institutional members. Tides Foundation is part of a collection of "Tides" groups. They all do interesting interesting work to aggregate resources for progressive philanthropy and nonprofits. If you don't know about them, be sure to check them out online at tides.org.

We also held our first West Coast EPIP Philanthropology© workshop yesterday. It was a day-long exploration of social justice principles, practices and politics inside foundations. Over 30 local funders and students attended -- plus one graduate student who flew in from out of state to participate! Many thanks to the EPIP Seattle local leadership for planning, Quixote Foundation for sponsorship, and the Evans Center at University of Washington for hosting!