The Regenerative Civic Impulse – Part 2

The California Community Foundation received a gigantic $200 million bequest a few years ago from a long-time Los Angeles civic activist by the name of Joan Palevsky. One of the best things the foundation has done so far with Palevsky’s generosity, in my opinion, is to appoint as Palevsky Fellows and take under the foundation’s nurturing wing two exemplary young women – Rosie Arroyo and Sandy Escobedo.

For two full years, Rosie and Sandy have been awarded the vantage point of a local philanthropic powerhouse from which to view a lifetime of opportunities. Better still, each has been assigned a project that could re-shape the lives of people and communities they care about. Sandy is immersed in a statewide advocacy effort aiming to show voters and policymakers the many ways in which robust pre-school opportunities build stronger, more economically independent families. Rosie has trained her laser focus on building the strongest possible citizen involvement in community issues affecting the daily lives of El Monte’s 125,000 residents.

Well under the age of 30, both young women have been assigned along with their projects the enviable task of figuring out philanthropy’s strategic role in advancing social and civic change. Will they end up working as grantmakers when the Fellowship is over? Maybe. But I plied them with a different idea: convince the California Community Foundation to make the Palevsky Fellows a HUGE program. Get the Foundation to let them – Sandy and Rosie – take their experience and astonish us with the training program they would invent. Open it to 20, 50, or a 100 young men and women a year. Kick the doors to philanthropic leadership and opportunity wide open – from the inside out! Model the program on Coro’s famous Fellows Program. Hell’s bells and better yet, form an alliance with Coro, tap into the region’s best-built network of public affairs leadership trainers, distinguished alumni, seasoned field faculty, and run the thing together. And, by all means, make this thing STUPENDOUS. Dare to influence the entire next generation of civic and community change makers in Southern California. Dare like no other funding organization has ever dared to do before. Why?

Because that would make Joan Palevsky, bless her soul, dance with joy on whatever activist cloud she’s staked out in heaven. She’s looking down right now with a beatific smile because she knows the Foundation’s leadership got it right. She’s grinning like a kid in a candy store knowing that Sandy and Rosie – energetic, intelligent, shrewd, and committed to making this place work – embody the essence of civic regeneration. They are young. They are hope-filled. They hold in their able hands the future we’re all trying to build. And there’s a whole lot more like Sandy and Rosie who hunger for what California Community Foundation has challenged them to do.

Paul Vandeventer, President & CEO, Community Partners

June 2008