|
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
Access Strategies Fund was founded in 1999, by Maria and Greg Jobin-Leeds who wanted to address the root causes of economic and social powerlessness in communities of color in Massachusetts. Since its creation, the Access Strategies Fund has provided over $2 million in funding, and leveraged another $2 million from foundations and donors to community-based and statewide organizations in urban areas in Massachusetts.
Staff
Board of Directors
2008 Grantmaking Committee Members
Jeanette Huezo
Calvin Feliciano
Renae Gray
Meizhu Lui
Yawu Miller
Clara Savage
Tyra Sidberry
Leverett Wing
Kelly Bates, Esq.
Executive Director, Access Strategies Fund
Ms. Bates is the Executive Director of Access Strategies Fund. The Access Strategies Fund helps disenfranchised communities in Massachusetts to harness their collective power to access the democratic process to improve their lives. Access Strategies Fund provides funding, consulting, and training resources to nonprofit organizations in Massachusetts. Access Strategies Fund grantee organizations have trained new public leaders, mobilized voters, advocated for electoral reforms, and built an influential network and infrastructure to promote democracy. Kelly runs Access Strategies Fund’s grantmaking and technical assistance program.
Kelly Bates is a bridge builder, change activist, and attorney with expertise in civic change and organizational development. Kelly has a career in politics, nonprofit management, philanthropy, and human services that spans twenty years. Before coming to Access, Kelly was a respected consultant in the field of leadership, organizational development, and diversity, working with over 50 institutions, large and small, in the public and private arena. Prior to her consulting career, Kelly was the Executive Director of the Women’s State-Wide Legislative Network, a powerful legislative advocacy organization for women. She was the chief lobbyist responsible for the passage of a state law in Massachusetts that requires employers to develop policies and encourage training to prevent sexual harassment. Kelly also worked as a Legislative Advocate for the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, lobbying on human services and housing policy issues at the state level. Additionally, Kelly served as the Executive Director of the Healthworks Foundation, funding health and wellness programs for women and children.
Kelly is a member of the Massachusetts Bar and recipient of the Eureka-Boston Fellowship for Nonprofit Leaders. In 1999, Kelly received a proclamation from the Massachusetts House of Representatives in recognition of her efforts to improve health care, increase income to low-income families, and promote access to public housing. She is the author of the report: Massachusetts Candidate Pipeline Mapping Report, a survey of candidate recruitment and training programs for people of color and women in Massachusetts.
Stephona Stokes
Administrative Assistant
Stephona Stokes is the Administrative Assistant of Access Strategies Fund. She brings many years of administrative and community organizing experience to Access Strategies Fund. She has worked in various administrative capacities in nonprofits, academia, human services and construction. Stephona has served as an advocate to prevent statewide family homelessness in Massachusetts. As office manager of UMass Boston’s H.E.L.P. for Black Males Health Program, Stephona coordinated awareness projects that addressed racial disparities in urban communities. She also worked on a multi-million dollar, federally-funded community revitalization housing project in the Lower Roxbury/Dorchester neighborhood.
Stephona has a passion for building urban communities and believes the focus should be on empowerment through politics, fair and equal education, justice, and opportunity. Stephona has testified to the Massachusetts State Legislature on behalf of families to secure funding for the homeless in the budget. In 2004, she coordinated the National Black Agenda Convention which developed a national agenda for African-Americans and Black organizations. Over five hundred national community leaders, elected officials, historians, civil rights activists, and educators attended the landmark conference.
Stephona has been a tireless activist in her efforts to ensure that educational freedom of choice, and the rights of children with special needs and their families are protected. She has testified on behalf of families at various education committees throughout Massachusetts. Stephona filed a Federal class action lawsuit against both the Massachusetts and United States Departments of Education without the support of legal counsel on behalf of her son. As a result of the litigation, the Office for Civil Rights investigated and mandated that both the Massachusetts Department of Education and Boston Public Schools implement all services entitled under the No Child Left Behind Act and Americans with Disabilities Act. A life-long fourth generation Bostonian, Stephona lives in Roslindale, Massachusetts with her son.
Board of Directors
Maria Jobin-Leeds
Board Chair
Maria Jobin-Leeds is the Founder and Chairperson of the Access Strategies Fund. In 1999, Maria founded the Access Strategies Fund. As Chair, with the board and staff, they address the civic root causes of social and economic disparities. Access Strategies Fund assists community based organizations in underrepresented, low-income, communities of color and women’s communities to make their voices heard in the creation of sound public policies in Massachusetts. This collaborative, movement building work has produced large increases in voter turnout in urban African American, Latino and immigrant communities in the Commonwealth. Maria relishes and encourages the now frequent winning candidates resulting from community organizing and increased voter turnout supported by Access and she looks forward to the resulting shifts in policy and budget priorities. Maria’s strategy is to build organizational capacity for progressives and to help create opportunity for these individuals to become leaders and their organizations and issues to become mainstream and provide for the common good.
Maria Jobin-Leeds is the co-founder and managing partner of the Jobin-Leeds Partnership for Democracy and Education, LLC, Maria with her spouse Greg plans and directs the firm’s research, investments, programs, client services, grants management, strategic alliances, communications and operations. She is leading the Partnership’s formation of a pipeline for progressive women candidates in Massachusetts. For more than a decade, Maria has marshaled resources for candidates and ballot questions that motivate the electorate and speak to issues that are important to low income communities, African Americans, Latinos, immigrants and women. Maria’s career in philanthropy and civic engagement began at an early age from watching and helping her parents in their efforts on civil rights and feminism and global citizenship. She was born and lived in Puerto Rico as a child, and she spent time in the Sudan as a college student, where her education about the privileges of class, race and gender began. Maria started her education career as a health and biology teacher in a parochial, inner-city high school. She spent the first ten years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic providing counseling to people testing positive for HIV and training AIDS educators. She came to understand that only by addressing a root cause of the epidemic – the lack of political power on the part of people affected – would there be any chance for success in curbing the problem.
Maria helped found the Schott Foundation for Public Education in 1991, shaping mission, strategy, board, senior staff and outcomes, most recently as chair of the Strategy Committee. Schott supports the movement for high quality education by elevating the leadership of women and supporting the grassroots, bringing national attention to systemic discrimination against black boys, and leading funding efforts to better nurture all children. She is recognized by the Critical Impact Award from the Council on Foundations to Schott, the Monsignor Romero Award from the Foundation for Self Sufficiency in Central America (FSSCA), and the Morgenthau Award for Human Rights from the Cambridge City Democratic Committee. She was a 2008 recipient of the Center for Community Change Champion award honoring her efforts in immigrant and poor people’s civic advancement. Maria helped to established Young Sisters for Justice at the Boston Women’s Fund, getting girls to direct philanthropy to girls. Maria earned a Masters degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Bachelor’s degree from Colby College.
Greg Jobin-Leeds
Treasurer
Greg Jobin-Leeds is the Treasurer and Co-founder of Access Strategies Fund. Greg Jobin-Leeds has made a career out of launching and nurturing successful, high-impact public policy organizations. His talent for recruiting effective leaders and guiding their efforts to break new ground has led to milestone victories for the nation’s historically underserved children and most under-represented families.
Greg is Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of the award winning Schott Foundation for Public Education. Under Greg’s leadership, Schott began funding the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) in 1993 and later helped found the Alliance for Quality Education (AQE). Through litigation, legislation, media and grassroots organizing, both organizations’ efforts led to winning $7.4 billion annually for high-need New York schools. Schott won the Council of Foundation’s 2007 Critical Impact Award for this victory. In 1999, Schott recruited the leadership and provided the start-up funding for the Early Education for All (EEA) campaign in Massachusetts, which successfully advocated for a universal pre-kindergarten education bill. In 2003, Schott published State Report Cards on “Public Education and Black Male Students,” which generated a national consciousness, leading many to confront historical inequities and rethink how to educate boys of color. In 2004, the Foundation created The Schott Fellowship for Early Care and Education at Cambridge College to train new public policy leaders of color.
As the son of immigrants who escaped Nazi persecution, Greg lives the commitment of fighting for fairness and social justice. He is driven by the fundamental belief that excellence is the result of inclusion not exclusion. Greg has been dedicated to educational excellence throughout his career. Early in his career he worked as a high school English teacher, then he trained adult literacy teachers, and more recently he has worked to increase political access for disenfranchised populations. He has a Master’s degree from Teacher's College, Columbia University and more than 25 years of education, public policy, media, community organizing and leadership experience.
John C. Bonifaz
Board Member
John C. Bonifaz is the Legal Director of Voter Action, a national non-profit organization working across the United States to protect the right to vote and the integrity of our elections. Prior to joining Voter Action, Mr. Bonifaz worked with the National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI), an organization he founded in 1994. NVRI served as a prominent legal and public education center dedicated to protecting the right of all citizens to vote and to participate in the electoral process on an equal and meaningful basis.
From 1994-2004, Mr. Bonifaz served as NVRI’s executive director and from 2004-2006, he served as NVRI’s general counsel. In January 2007, NVRI became formally affiliated with Demos, a New York-based public policy research and advocacy group, and Mr. Bonifaz served as a Senior Legal Fellow at Demos in its Democracy Program until May 2007 when he joined Voter Action. Mr. Bonifaz has been at the forefront of key voting rights battles in the country over the past 15 years: leading the fight in the federal courts in Ohio for a recount of the 2004 presidential vote in that state; pioneering a series of court challenges that have helped to redefine the campaign finance question as a basic voting rights issue of our time; and prevailing in federal court in Pennsylvania on the eve of the 2008 election to ensure that Pennsylvania voters would receive emergency paper ballots when they faced long lines caused by voting machine breakdowns.
Mr. Bonifaz is a 1992 cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and a 1999 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Mr. Bonifaz resides in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Lissa Pierce Bonifaz, and their daughter Marisol.
Dayna L. Cunningham
Board Member
Dayna L. Cunningham is Executive Director of the Center for Reflective Community Practice (CRCP) at MIT. CRCP is a center of research and practice within the MIT Department of Urban Planning. It supports on-the-ground planning and development expertise of DUSP faculty and students with its unique capacity to help community residents and leaders "know what they know" – about themselves and their neighborhoods, and help them develop and apply that knowledge to innovative experiments and prototyped solutions to urban challenges. In 2006-2007, Cunningham directed the ELIAS Project, and MIT-based collaboration between business, ngos and government that seeks to use processes of profound innovation to advance economic, social and environmental sustainability.
Cunningham was an Associate Director at the Rockefeller Foundation from 1997-2004. At Rockefeller she funded initiatives that examined the relationship between democracy and race, changing racial dynamics and new conceptions of race in the U.S., as well as innovation in the area of civil rights legal work. From 2004-2006 she was associated with Public Interest Projects, a non-profit project management and philanthropic consulting firm based in New York City, where she managed foundation collaboratives on social justice issues.
Before coming to the Rockefeller Foundation, Cunningham worked as a voting rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, litigating cases in Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi and elsewhere in the South, and briefly as an officer for the New York City Program at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Cunningham is a 2004 graduate of the Sloan Fellows MBA program of the MIT Sloan School of Management. She has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and Radcliff Colleges and a juris doctor degree from New York University School of Law.
Jeannette Huezo
Board Member
Jeannette Huezo coordinates United for a Fair Economy’s popular education work and facilitates many workshops, in particular for Latino groups. Originally from El Salvador, Jeannette came to the US in 1989. She has spent her life working for justice and social change. By developing confidence and leadership skills in others, she has increased the number of activists in the struggle for social change, and has empowered women, immigrants and others facing injustice to participate in the decision-making process around issues that affect their lives.
Jeannette's first organizing job in the United States was with the Latino Parents Association. She then went on to spend four years at the Coalition for Basic Human Needs (CBHN), organizing low-income women to fight for their rights. Then, Jeannette went to work for the Women's Institute for Leadership Development (WILD) as the Program Director / Trainer / Organizer. Following that, she worked as a Union Organizer for Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 254, organizing immigrant workers like herself to find their voice as members of the labor movement.
Jeannette is an Advisory Board Member of the Center to Support Immigrant Organizing (CSIO). Jeannette is the mother of nine children, two of whom still live in El Salvador.