Copyright Sue Dion-Gerzabek

The Internet has created the conditions for working globally from Santa Cruz in ways we could have never imagined twenty years ago. Yet, individual activists still struggle to find like-minded people in our community with whom to share our journey.

Many feel shut down by the attitudes of neighbors and co-workers. They say we should focus on reducing homelessness, protecting the Monterey Bay, and improving local schools. We don’t see these borders. The geography of our giving is wider. For us, a child in Rwanda deserves as good an education as a child in Live Oak.

None of us prioritize global over local issues as more significant or meaningful; we simply focus on the issues and people that call out to us and fit our skill sets. We all volunteer for and contribute money to organizations and causes that address both global and local issues. But the global part of our giving does not have a ready community.

To help create this community for myself, I selfishly started a MeetUp Group for locals interested in international social justice.

Our First Meeting in November 2010

On a cold and dark evening, four hardy souls joined me at Dharma’s, a local vegetarian restaurant. We fell into conversation so easily that you would have thought we were long lost high school friends.

I remember the astonished and grateful look on Cory Ybarra’s face when we told her we wanted to hear every detail of her work with disabled children in Tanzania and Peru.

Lisa Poll’s face lit up when I asked her to share her story. She recounted the anxiety and excitement she felt as she prepared to exchange her life as a Deputy District Attorney for one as a manager of programs for children orphaned and affected by AIDS in South Africa. This mature attorney had the look of a giddy teenager splat across her face.

One year later, we are over sixty members strong, a network of internationally minded activists living in the central coast.

Why Meet In Person When You’ve Got the Internet?

Essential but not sufficient. That’s how I describe technology and the Internet. Despite the much-lauded aspects of the Internet, the cell phone and cheap air travel which have created an environment in which local citizens of Santa Cruz County can volunteer time and give resources to far-flung communities, people still need people. As they say in Wolof (a native language of Senegal): “Nit, nit moy garab-am.” “Humans are their own best medicine.”

Like a Friday night poker game, we assembled on Tuesday night at a round table in downtown Santa Cruz.  Instead of throwing down cards and placing bets, we shared stories about peace building, fundraising, social media, Africa and not getting burned out. We munched on crackers and hummus, savored a freshly baked raw apple cake and drank tea and red wine.

These energetic individuals raise money and spend time getting to know people in small villages and towns in order to make a difference for those living on less than a dollar a day. This roundtable was not in New York or Washington, D.C. It was in Santa Cruz, California – a town known for beaches, surfing, and the redwoods.

Like most good things, the engagement of our community in international causes is not well known nor does it have a platform. Our local community foundation focuses on local priorities, a clear focus that embraces our community in an important and rightful way. Yet, where do we build community for those working and volunteering in organizations with a global reach? How do we build networks, learn best practices and validate this work?

The Santa Cruz International MeetUp gives us a forum here in Santa Cruz County. It is a place to meet with like-minded individuals and create a sense of fellowship, the kind of peer group learning that propels our work. We have a sister organization in Silicon Valley called Collaborate for Africa led by dynamic J.P. Morgan financial planner Jeff Chow.

The Internet has created the conditions for working globally from Santa Cruz in ways we could never have imagined twenty years ago. We are connected to communities around the world and we can network with like-minded people here in Santa Cruz.

We need face-to-face relationships to confront our challenges and to get honest feedback about our next steps. We are consultants, donors, journalists, academics, and individuals. We are like Lisa Poll, one of our first members, who now blogs from Zambia and South Africa about what it is like to be on the frontlines of community and personal transformation.

We need community.

Join us at The Santa Cruz International MeetUp.

Member Organizations / Partial List

• One World Children’s Fund
• The Voices of Angels Foundation
• The Firelight Foundation
• Building for Generations
• IF
• Karimu Foundation
• The Ihangane Project

A high school band from Austin, Texas rocking the Association of Small Foundations

As a first-timer, I learned that small foundations can combine creativity and vision with small dollars to create tangible, results oriented social change. I was impressed. Here are a few examples I got a chance to learn about. There are many more. Apologies to those I missed.

Create a Foundation Facebook

Leveraging their prestige as a foundation, the F.C. Fox Foundation employs their web site as a virtual site visit enabling their grantees to put up a video, a profile, contact information, and a donate now button. This strategy has netted one grantee No Limits almost $50,000 in sales for their theater kit for deaf and hard of hearing kids!

Bring Citizen Voices into Legislation

Tackling an health advocacy agenda The Sunflower Foundation tipped the scales in Kansas to pass second-hand smoke legislation that had floundered in the legislature for ten years! They hired a grassroots organizer and used the power of a telephone bank to capture the stories of how smoking has impacted the lives of individual Kansans. This resulted in legislators hearing directly from constituents about how second-hand smoke had affected their lives. For the full story read here. The American Association of Political Consultants gave them an prize for using new technology in advocacy!

Inspire People to Connect Globally

A photo of a woman and her family in Austin, Texas carrying water in plastic jugs from the local river on their heads juxtaposed with women from Ethiopia, A Glimmer of Hope Foundation is making the connection for local donors about the importance of access to water. “We are social investors investing in social entrepreneurs,” CEO Philip Berber stated. I like the way he has transformed the language surrounding integrated participatory rural development and made it accessible to the next generation. Brian Cooper, the Executive Director and his team are borrowing creatively from corporate America to convince people to dig deep for basic infrastructure and microfinance.

Invest in Cost Benefit Analysis

By calculating the cost of one youth in the juvenile justice system, the Tow Foundation has helped catalyzed a movement for investment in children and youth that has paid off for marginalized youth in Connecticut. The legislature is investing more on prevention programs and seeing fewer, far fewer youth in juvenile court and in jail. Lives saved, hope restored. The best part is that Tow understands how to communicate this through their beautiful brochure the Power of Partnership, required reading for any communications director.

These are just a few examples of the innovative, cutting edge work being done with small dollars and high energy by foundation staff who joined the conversation in Austin.

I’d love to see the Council on Foundations ensure that their smaller foundation colleagues were connected with the larger, staffed independent and corporate foundations. When the news is dominated by $100 million grants, it’s reassuring to realize that dollars don’t always make the biggest difference, ideas do and some of the best ideas can be found at small foundations.

Why do people love social media?

Because tweeting and blogging are fast, frank and fun.

I liken it to a mini op-ed page from a much more diverse set of voices than your local newspaper. While blogs may yield uneven journalism, it does helps you be in two places at once, physically impossible but virtually I find it is becoming a strange reality. For an anthropologist, I find it both seductive and intriguing.

In this final post to the Gw/oB Conference Blog, I include three things: 1) the wrap-up of our efforts, 2) a description of how I organized the blog effort in 72 hours, and 3) a few reflections on the experience.

1. Wrap-up of the Conference Blog

By the end of the week, our social media effort yielded: six posts by four bloggers, 231 tweets from 35 contributors and a citation in the Chronicle of Philanthropy: 6/9/2010 Daily Update From the Chronicle of Philanthropy that generated 390 unique page views. The blogs ranged from a summary of issues to personal perspectives as follows:

Shouldn’t All Grantmakers & NGOs Work Harder to Fail Forward, Hand-in-Hand?

by David Kramer on June 11, 2010

A commentary on the value of why learning from mistakes and sharing them openly is essential to good grantmaking and social change work.

Networking on Steroids: A Reciprocity Web Defined

by Jennifer Astone on June 10, 2010

A step-by-step guide to the reciprocity web, a fabulous networking tool used at Gw/oB conferences.

Raised at Gw/oB: Critical Issues in International Grantmaking

by Adin Miller on June 10, 2010

Adin highlight four key themes from the Africa convening about the challenges and successes of international grantmakers funding grassroots and community-based efforts.

Anatomy of a Global Donor

by Jennifer Astone on June 9, 2010

A summary of outgoing Gw/oB Executive Director John Harvey’s speech on what he has learned from ten years of listening to and learning from social justice philanthropists.

The Power of One, or the Momentum of Many?

by Peter Laugharn on June 9, 2010

Discussion of what drives social enterprise non-profits: do communities make the organization or do their leaders?

Do Funders Exploit Community-Based Organizations?

by Dr. Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg on June 8, 2010

Why funders need to take community-based organizations more seriously.

2. Organizing the Gw/oB Conference Blog

On the Thursday morning before the conference, I was on the phone lamenting the lack of media coverage of the impending Gw/oB conference (June 7-9) with Adin Miller. His response: “Jen, it’s easy to make it happen.” Startled I asked him for advice. Within 48 hours, we had lined up four people to blog, a twitter hashtag #gwob, and set up a protocol for posting on Firelight Foundation’s blog site. Adin is a veteran conference blogger and I am a newbie.

We used a google docs excel spreadsheet to identify who would cover what sessions but that rapidly broke down. We had only a few bloggers and people covered what interested them.

Adin recommended using Tweetdeck for following the tweets. I downloaded it and found pretty easy to use but overwhelming. Let’s just say that tweeting wouldn’t have been half as much fun without the bit.ly sidebar which shortened the URLs for me, although sometimes they are just as long as the original!

While Gw/oB didn’t have a blog platform, one of the member foundations did, so I called up Firelight Foundation Executive Director Peter Laugharn and asked if they would host us [Full disclosure - I worked as Executive Director there for seven years]. His Communications Director Suzana Grego came back with a resounding yes. Turns out everyone is trying to find ways to create interesting content and drive traffic to their site!

Editorial role

As traffic cop for Firelight, I did have to respond to bloggers’ concerns about whether the content of their blog postings hit the right note or not. I decided not to play editor with the content. My rule was if a writer had doubts, give them 24 hours to sleep on it and then decide. I did ask writers to split blog entries that I thought tried to cover too much territory into two different columns, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.

Mostly, I played the role of cheerleader.

3. Confessions of a First-Time Blogger

1. I found that I wrote blog posts at night in my jammies at the end of a long conference day and it was less intimidating to speak my mind.

2. I reminded myself that my words were just one experience so I gave up the journalist hat and focused.

3. I was intimidated by both the time pressure and the thought that my ideas may not be fully formed. But in the end felt like some written record of the Gw/oB Conference was important.

Last Thoughts – What did I learn from the Gw/oB Conference?

I learned that, as usual, foundations, both big and small, identify the best and the brightest minds to do their grantmaking. They then bury them in work and expectations that narrow their vision and ability to connect. One of my favorite program officers at a medium-sized foundation is so overloaded that she cannot perceive of taking the time to get to know her colleagues. And I insisted that she do it by making formal introductions to several colleagues that she needs to be working with. It is wrong for us to work in isolation, reinvent the wheel and hold on to the precious lessons we learn every day from the people we care about the most: our grantees and partners.

That’s why we attend conferences, that’s why we blog and tweet about them, that’s why social media is breaking down the barriers in the way email and the internet replaced the telex and faxes and phone calls of the 1980s. Let’s turn conference attendance into a pledge for action by connecting with foundation colleagues and sharing information.