Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees - GCIR

Sue Lin Chong, Co-Chair and Communications Committee Chair
Public Affairs Manager
Annie E. Casey Foundation
Baltimore, MD

Sue Lin Chong is the public affairs manager at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Prior to joining the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Sue Lin supervised the health care and broadcast groups at Devillier Communications, a Washington, D.C.-based public relations and marketing firm, where she managed the public relations campaigns of several clients, including the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her prior experience also includes serving as the director of public relations at the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown University Medical Center; senior manager of program information for PBS; and communications manager for MDLinx, Inc., an Internet-based knowledge service for health care professionals. Sue Lin was also an associate at the law firm Carlsmith Ball in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she practiced commercial litigation. She has a BA in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and a JD from the William S. Richardson School of Hawaii at the University of Hawaii.

Darren Sandow, Co-Chair
Executive Director
Hagedorn Foundation
Port Washington, NY

Darren Sandow is the executive director of the Hagedorn Foundation, which supports and promotes social equity on Long Island. Under his leadership, the Hagedorn Foundation has spearheaded the Long Island Census 2010 Initiative and has supported cutting-edge community and public-private initiatives that work to diminish tensions between established residents and newly arrived immigrants. Darren joined the Hagedorn Foundation in August of 2005 after serving as the program director for the Long Island Community Foundation and the Long Island Unitarian Universalist Fund. He has served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica, worked at the Health and Welfare Council of Nassau County, and served as the CFO for the People's Firehouse in Brooklyn. Darren is a graduate of the Master's Program for Nonprofit Management at New School for Social Research. He has worked closely with fellow GCIR members through the Four Freedoms Fund.

Jocelyn Ancheta, Secretary
Program Officer
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation
Eagan, MN

Jocelyn Ancheta joined the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation as program officer in October 2005. In that capacity, she manages Healthy Together: Creating Community with New Americans. Prior to that, Jocelyn was a program officer in Children and Families at The McKnight Foundation for almost 11 years, where she managed Community Support and Connections, among other programs. She has worked as a safety program coordinator at the Minnesota Department of Traffic Safety; community worker with Catholic Charities; legal advocate with the Domestic Abuse Project; and project manager for Metro Deaf Senior Citizens. Her board involvement includes Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, Filipino American Women's Network, MN, and Philippine Center of Minnesota. She holds an MA in Public Affairs and a BA in Education/Park and Recreation Administration. Jocelyn emigrated from the Philippines to Minnesota with her family in 1966. She previously served on the GCIR board in 2003-04.

Bob Glaves, Treasurer
Executive Director
The Chicago Bar Foundation
Chicago, IL

Bob Glaves has served as executive director of The Chicago Bar Foundation since 1999, after a successful nine-year career as a civil litigator at the Chicago law firm then known as Menges, Mikus & Molzahn. He has received a number of commendations over the course of his career, highlighted by the Maurice Weigle Outstanding Young Lawyer Award in 1998, the Chicago Legal Clinic's Cardinal Bernadin Award for action on behalf of social justice in 2000, the Atticus Finch Award from Chicago Volunteer Legal Services in 2002, the Human Rights Practitioner of the Year Award at the Midwest Light of Human Rights Awards Luncheon in 2003, and a Distinguished Service Award from the John Marshall Law School Alumni Association in 2004. Bob also was selected in 2002 as one of the "40 Illinois Attorneys Under 40 to Watch" by Law Bulletin Publishing Company. He is a 1991 magna cum laude graduate of The John Marshall Law School and received a BA in Political Science and Journalism from the University of Wisconsin in 1987.

Cory Anderson, Information Resources Committee Chair
Vice President
Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation
Little Rock, AR

Cory S. Anderson is vice president at the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, Cory served as program associate for the Annie E. Casey Foundation's KIDS COUNT Initiative for nearly seven years. In that capacity, he managed and funded a nationwide network of state-level KIDS COUNT projects that provide a more detailed, community-by-community picture of the condition of children. Before that, he was manager of Partner Development at the Forum for Youth Investment, engaging national organizations in partnerships designed to strengthen youth work. As a reporter with the Arkansas Gazette, he researched and reported on issues related to school, children and higher education. He has also served as a juvenile probation officer, a program coordinator for a direct service program that provided an array of services to families and children, and a state program specialist with the Corporation for National Service. As an intervention specialist and later a program specialist with New Futures for Youth, he assisted in the development of a model gang intervention program and then worked on youth employability issues.

Cathy Cha, Program Committee Chair
Senior Program Officer, Immigrant Rights and Integration
Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund
San Francisco, CA

Cathy Cha is senior program officer for Immigrant Rights and Integration at the Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, where she manages the Fund's efforts to promote equal opportunities for immigrants to become fully engaged citizens. Prior to her current position, Cathy worked for five years as a program officer in the Haas, Jr. Fund’s Neighborhoods and Strengthening Families programs. While in Boston, she served as a program officer for Community Economic Development at the Hyams Foundation and helped develop the English for New Bostonians initiative. Earlier in her career, Cathy served as project manager at the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation in San Francisco, developing affordable housing and starting the agency's first construction job training program for neighborhood residents. She also has worked for ICF Consulting, the City of Oakland, and the United Way in Seattle. She holds an MA in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Psychology from the University of Washington, Seattle. Cathy has been an active leader in the California Immigrant Integration Initiative, a regional GCIR effort to strengthen local immigrant integration infrastructure.

Alice Ito
Program Officer
Marguerite Casey Foundation
Seattle, WA

Alice Ito joined Marguerite Casey Foundation as a Program Officer in November of 2004. Prior to joining the Foundation, she conducted education, research, and oral history interviewing at Densho, a nonprofit organization that documents and educates about principles of democracy and the experiences of Japanese Americans incarcerated by the U.S. government, without due process of law and on the basis of their ancestry, during World War II. Prior to Densho, she directed the grant programs at the Social Justice Fund Northwest (formerly known as ATR, A Territory Resource), a foundation supporting organizations working for social, economic, and environmental justice in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming. Alice is a co-founder of nonprofit organizations including the Nonprofit Assistance Center in Seattle and the Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco. She has served as a board member for philanthropic and other nonprofit organizations including the Family Leadership Fund, National Network of Grantmakers, and Women’s Foundation of California. Alice has provided training and consulting services to nonprofits for over 20 years. Born and raised in Washington State, she is a grandchild of immigrants. She is a graduate of Stanford University and attended the program in Public Policy at Claremont Graduate School in California.

Ruby Lee
Program Director
Northwest Area Foundation
St. Paul, MN 

Ruby Lee is program director at the Northwest Area Foundation (NWAF), which focuses on asset development, civic engagement, and public policy to reduce poverty in the Foundation’s eight-state region. Prior to joining NWAF in 2006, she worked as a program officer at The Saint Paul Foundation for close to ten years where she managed grants and initiatives in the areas of neighborhood and community development, organizational capacity building, arts and humanities, immigrants and refugees, race and racism, literacy and higher education. She also previously worked for the State of Minnesota as a liaison between state government and Minnesota’s Latino community. Ruby has a BA in communications and public relations from Minnesota’s Metropolitan State University. Ruby was born and raised in Guatemala City, where her mother and siblings still reside. She has been an active GCIR member, most recently helping to plan a briefing for Minnesota funders and engaging funders in that region on immigration reform.

Geri Mannion, Membership Committee Chair
Director, U.S. Democracy Program and the Special Opportunities Fund
Carnegie Corporation of New York
New York, NY

Geri Mannion is director of the U.S. Democracy Program and of the Special Opportunities Fund at Carnegie Corporation of New York. The U.S. Democracy Program, which Geri has directed since 1998, focuses on immigrant civic integration, youth civic education, and election administration. The Fund allows the Corporation to respond to proposals that are important but not directly related to the foundation's primary foci. Prior to this current role, Geri staffed the Corporation's program of Special Projects for almost ten years. Prior to joining the Corporation, she spent 13 years in a variety of positions, including program associate for International Relations, at the Rockefeller Foundation and also served as a consultant with the Ford Foundation on its international affairs program. Geri co-chaired the Funders' Committee for Citizen Participation from 1993 to 1995 and is concluding another term as co-chair; she has also been active in the Social Justice Infrastructure Funders Group. Geri holds an MA in Political Science and a BA in English, both from Fordham University.

Mayra Peters-Quinteros
Program Officer, Migrant and Immigrant Rights
Ford Foundation
New York, NY

Mayra Peters-Quinteros is program officer for the Migrant and Immigrant Rights portfolio at the Ford Foundation. Over the course of her career, Mayra has worked on immigrant rights issues in the public, academic, and nonprofit sectors. As director of the Bureau of Immigrant Workers' Rights at the New York State Department of Labor, she led a statewide initiative to protect and advance the rights of immigrants in New York and to develop and reform government agency policies affecting immigrants. Prior to that, Mayra taught at New York University (NYU) School of Law, co-directing its Immigrant Rights Clinic. Her work there focused on low-wage and immigrant worker representation and providing legal aid to community-based organizations. She also developed the first immigrant rights project at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a national civil rights organization, where she served as a Skadden Fellow and associate counsel. Earlier, she completed a clerkship with U.S. District Court Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. in the Eastern District of New York. Mayra earned a joint degree in law from NYU, where she was a Root-Tilden-Snow Scholar, and in international development from Princeton University, where she was a Ford Foundation fellow. She completed her bachelor's degree in political economy at the University of California at Berkeley. She is originally from Panama.

Maria Teresa Rojas
Director, International Migration Initiative
Open Society Foundations
New York, NY

Maria Teresa Rojas is director of the international migration initiative at the Open Society Foundations, which she joined in 2000 initially as associate director in the communications department and then in the grantmaking and program development department. Maria Teresa brings more than 25 years of combined management and communications experience in the public, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors, as well as expertise in strategic communications, project management, and television production. Prior to joining OSI, Maria Teresa served as director of communications & external relations at the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers from 1997 to 2000. Her other work experience includes program manager at Bellevue Hospital; general manager at Crosswalks Television Network, City of New York; executive director of the NYC Commission on Public Information and Communications; special assistant to the president at Community Service Society of New York; and regional director of the Caribbean Development Program, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Maria Teresa holds an MPA from Bernard M. Baruch College of The City University of New York and a BA in communications from Rutgers University.

Manuel J. Santamaria
Grantmaking Director
Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Mountain View, CA

Manuel J. Santamaria is grantmaking director at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, where he leads the Immigrant Integration grantmaking strategy and has the primary responsibility of linking donor engagement staff to community organizations, regional needs, and grantmaking best practices. He joined Peninsula Community Foundation in 1999 and managed the nine community collaborative sites of the Peninsula Partnership for Children, Youth and Families^TM, which brought together city-, school- and community-based organizations in San Mateo County. He also helped launch and manage community-wide initiatives that improved the health and well-being of children ages 0-8 years old. Prior to the foundation, Manuel developed and led initiatives for a network of family resource centers; helped develop education programs for children and adults; and has worked with local organizations that advocate for the protection of immigrant rights. Manuel is a bilingual and bicultural facilitator with extensive community-based teaching and organizing experience. He holds an MA in Public Administration and a BA in International Relations.

Molly Schultz Hafid
Program Officer
Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock
Manhasset, NY

Molly Schultz Hafid is a program officer at the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, where she is responsible for the Democratic Participation, Civil and Constitutional Rights and Community Organizing program areas. Prior to the Veatch Program, she worked as the Director of Grantmaking Programs at the Jewish Fund for Justice, where she managed a portfolio that included grantmaking to community organizing and advocacy groups, redevelopment and recovery grants in the Gulf Coast region (following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita), the Seasons Fund for Social Transformation (a Ford Foundation initiative), and management of the individual donor-advised fund program. Molly has also worked as a program manager of Strategic Partnerships at the Jewish Funders Network and as the Acting Deputy Director of the North Star Fund. She has held positions as a director, grantmaker, and development professional for nonprofit organizations in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Vermont, and Ohio. Molly holds an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Literature from Antioch College and Nonprofit Management from the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. Molly’s research interest is the role of charitable capital flows in building civil society in the Middle East and North Africa. She recently completed a research fellowship at the American University in Cairo.

Tony Tapia
Director, NGO Relations
Western Union Foundation
Englewood, CO

Tony Tapia is the senior program director for the Western Union Foundation, the charitable arm of the Western Union Company, where he oversees the foundation's strategic global-giving programs and non-governmental organization (NGO) partnerships. Tony works with Western Union Agents worldwide to promote charitable giving. Previously, Tony was the director of grantmaking for the Denver-based Gill Foundation, where he oversaw funding to social justice and human service nonprofit organizations in the United States. Prior to his work at the Gill Foundation, Tony was the senior director of Cultural Participation Programs at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters in Washington, D.C. In that capacity, he directed a grantmaking program that supported artists' residencies, and engaged communities in the performing arts in the United States. Tony currently serves as a trustee of the Bright Mountain Foundation and is on the board of Metro Volunteers. He has served on numerous boards including Hispanics in Philanthropy, Latin American Research and Services Agency, and Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues.

Dianne Yamashiro-Omi
Program Manager, Equity & Diversity
The California Endowment
Oakland, CA

Dianne Yamashiro-Omi joined The California Endowment as a program officer in 2000. She currently serves as the program manager for Diversity and Equity. Dianne, who has more than 20 years of experience in philanthropy, was previously a senior program officer for The Endowment’s Culturally Competent Health Systems and Diversifying the Healthcare Workforce program during which she oversaw the program’s grant-making activities. Dianne is a recipient of the 2008 National Fundraising Executive’s Outstanding Philanthropy Professional Award and a member of California’s Commission on Asian Pacific Islander Affairs. Prior to joining The Endowment, she served as a foundation consultant with a number of organizations including the Levi Strauss Foundation, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, the Asian Pacific American Community Fund, and The San Francisco Foundation. Dianne holds a BA in Social Science from U.C. Berkeley and a teaching credential from the University of San Francisco.