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Access Strategies Fund was founded in 1999, by Maria and Greg Jobin-Leeds. Their goal for Access Strategies Fund was 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 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
Kelly Bates is the Executive Director of Access Strategies Fund. Kelly
Bates is a bridge builder, change activist, and attorney with expertise
in leadership development, political change, management, executive transitions,
diversity, organizational development, conflict resolution, training,
and facilitation.
Kelly has a career in politics, nonprofit management, philanthropy, and
human services that spans fifteen years. Ms. Bates was a respected consultant
in the field of leadership and management, working with over 50 institutions,
large and small, in the public and private arena. Before joining the consulting
field, Kelly was the Executive Director of the Women’s State-Wide
Legislative Network, leading a membership organization of over 50 women’s
organizations, 1000 members, and women legislators to create a powerful
legislative lobby for women. 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.
During her tenure at the Women’s State-Wide Legislative Network, Kelly Bates 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. She organized a strong and powerful coalition of women’s organizations to change the state’s policy. 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.
Kelly is a member of the Massachusetts Bar and recipient of the Eureka-Boston Fellowship for Nonprofit Leaders. She is the recipient of the Rising Star of the Year Award by the UMASS Program for Women in Politics and Government. She has served on numerous nonprofit boards including Emerge Massachusetts, the Mavin Foundation, WomenIn and the Massachusetts Human Services Coalition. Kelly Bates received her bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Albany in Africana Studies and a law degree from the Boston University School of Law. Kelly, a Biracial woman of African-American and Irish/English ancestry was raised in New York City and lives in Boston, Massachusetts with her husband and son.
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.
Maria has worked to marshal resources for ballot questions and candidates that motivate the electorate and speak to issues that are important to low-income communities, African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants and women. She is currently leading the Partnership for Democracy and Education, a national effort focused on voter turnout, issue campaigns and candidate support. Maria served as advisor to Tides Foundation’s voter mobilization work and is on the board of the Campaign for America’s Future (CAF). Maria is head of the strategy committee and a founding member of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, which promotes the movement for high quality and early education in Massachusetts and New York.
Before her political work, Maria spent a decade training HIV educators and providing counseling to people testing for HIV. She started her education career as a health and biology teacher in Boston and went on to earn her Masters Degree in Education from Harvard University. Maria’s first political activism was at age 10 when she canvassed for her father’s school committee campaign.
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 that engages in legal advocacy, research, and public education to ensure election integrity in the United States. Prior to joining Voter Action, John worked for more than a dozen years 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 civic process on an equal and meaningful basis. From 1994-2004, John served as NVRI’s executive director and from 2004-2006, John 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 John 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 dozen years. He led the fight in the federal courts in Ohio for a recount of the 2004 presidential vote in that state. He has pioneered a series of court challenges that have helped to redefine the campaign finance question as a basic voting rights issue of our time. He has worked to defend laws passed at the state level which overhaul the campaign finance system and open up the political process to all candidates and voters, regardless of economic status.
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, Dr. Lissa Pierce Bonifaz, a professor of bilingual education at Lesley University, and their baby 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, an 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.