Foundations
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Jeff Raikes |
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the nation’s largest grant maker (assets: $37.3 billion), has named Jeff Raikes as CEO. He is the second chief executive of the foundation, which was founded in 1997 as the Gates Library Foundation and merged with the William H. Gates Foundation in 2000.
Raikes joins the foundation and its staff of 500 from the ranks of Microsoft, the company that generated its founder’s largesse. He was president of the Microsoft Business Division, which handles business productivity products, including Microsoft Office. Since Raikes took the helm in 2000, the division’s annual revenue has doubled to an average of $16 billion.
He co-founded the Raikes Foundation with his wife, Tricia Raikes, in 2002. Last year it made $6.1 million in grants for youth development, mostly in the Puget Sound area. Grantees in 2007 included $12,500 for the Kirkland, Wash.-based America’s Foundation for Chess, $525,000 for the College Success Foundation in Issaquah, Wash., and $1,000 for job training at Seattle-based FareStart.
Raikes replaces Patty Stonesifer, who had also been a Microsoft executive.
The change moved along pretty quickly for Gates, considering that Stonesifer announced in February that she would stay on through January 2009, if necessary. Raikes announced his retirement from Microsoft in January, and was set to stay with the company through September.
The foundation said Stonesifer will remain on staff. Smart move, because she has to be the most cost-effective executive in recent history. Stonesifer has refused to take a salary since her first day on the job at the foundation. Contact: (206) 709-3100, www.gatesfoundation.org.
The Troy, Mich.-based Kresge Foundation (assets: $3.8 billion), which supports construction and renovation projects by nonprofits, hired Lois DeBacker to be a program director. She goes to Kresge from a grant maker about 50 miles north of Troy: the Flint-based Charles Stewart Mott Foundation (assets: $2.7 billion), where she served as associate vice president for programs. Kresge is lead by President Rip Rapson. Contact: (248) 643-9630, www.kresge.org.
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation (assets: $6.6 billion) in Los Altos, Calif., named Irene Wong as its director for local grant making. Wong goes from eBay Foundation, based in San Jose. Packard has $300 million budgeted for 2008 grant making, of which a healthy portion is targeted at programs helping children and families. The foundation has increased its assets by nearly $1 billion since 2006. Contact: (650) 948-7658, www.packard.org.
Nonprofits
City Year, a Boston-based national service program and one of the largest national partners for AmeriCorps, named Chuck Gordon to serve as its chief development officer. Gordon goes to City Year from the United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley, also in Boston, where he was senior vice president for leadership giving.
City Year, lead by CEO and founder Michael Brown, uses its $50 million annual budget to serve 1,400 youth annually at its 18 sites. Contact: (617) 927-2500, www.cityyear.org.
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Dwayne Wharton |
Dwayne Wharton was hired as deputy director at the national office of Friends of the Children, which pairs paid, full-time mentors with children for the duration of their education, from kindergarten through high school.
Friends, under new Executive Director Judith Stavisky, is just about finished relocating from its founding city of Portland, Ore., to Philadelphia (which does not operate a Friends site). Wharton was the director of residential and homeless programs at Project HOME, a nonprofit that serves homeless people in Philadelphia, for a year and a half, after a six-year run with the American Red Cross.
Wharton is primarily responsible for making sure that the Friends chapters – operating in Boston, Cincinnati, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and Klamath Falls, Ore. – are adhering to the organization’s quality standards for recruiting mentors and selecting children. Contact: (215) 575-1105, www.friendsofthechildren.org.
YouthBuild USA has hired Scott Peterson for a newly created position. Peterson will be national director of criminal justice programs and policy at the nonprofit, which is based in Somerville, Mass., and provides assistance and advocacy for the 226 federally funded YouthBuild sites around the country.
Peterson spent the past 10 years with the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, most recently as the federal program manager. Before that, he helped open a homeless shelter and youth courts while working for the Center for the Advancement of Family and Youth in Albany, N.Y., then was founding director of the Colonie Youth Court in Latham, N.Y.
Peterson’s job will include beefing up the training on incarceration and re-entry provided to youth workers at YouthBuild sites, many of whom have not had experience working with offender populations. He says the organization hopes to eventually win money for that work from his old employer, OJJDP, through a discretionary grant. The agency has never approved a grant for YouthBuild USA.
The nonprofit (fiscal 2008 budget: $25 million) has a staff of 60, led by founder Dorothy Stoneman. Contact: (617) 741-1259, www.youthbuild.org.
The Louisville, Ky.-based National Center for Family Literacy promoted Senior Director Emily Kirkpatrick to be vice president. Kirkpatrick previously oversaw development and external affairs for the nonprofit, which provides training and advocacy work to help implement literacy programs. Contact: (502) 584-1133, www.famlit.org.
Virginia McEnerney is the new executive director at the New York-based Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, a nonprofit that seeks to “identify, motivate and validate the next generation of artists and writers” around the nation.
The alliance operates the annual Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, which this year recognized the work of 1,000 youths. The awards are sponsored by children’s publishing and media company Scholastic.
McEnerney goes to the alliance from Headcount, a New York voter registration organization, where she was executive director. Contact: (212) 343-6100, www.artandwriting.org.
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Josh Kraft |
The Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston (BGCB) searched nationally for a new CEO, then ended up hiring from the backyard: Josh Kraft. In July he will replace Linda Whitlock, who leaves the job after 10 years.
Kraft first joined the club in 1990 to manage an outreach program in South Boston. Since 1993, he has been executive director of the Jordan Boys & Girls Clubs, BGCB’s site in the Boston suburb of Chelsea. The organization serves about 14,000 youth each year at its nine clubs in the Boston area.
One partner the clubs won’t soon lose is the New England Patriots. Kraft’s father, Bob Kraft, owns the team, and Josh moonlights as the president of The New England Patriots Foundation.
Kraft has his own playbook to follow. The nonprofit recently committed itself to a five-year strategic plan that includes doubling the number of youth served by the Boston clubs by 2013. Contact: (617) 994-4700, www.bgcb.org.
Pressley Ridge, a nonprofit that serves at-risk and developmentally challenged children in eight states and Washington, D.C., announced in April that it will merge with Family and Children Services of Central Pennsylvania. The new organization will keep the Pressley Ridge name.
All the staffers from both organizations will be kept on, although the roles of various executive staff members have not yet been determined. Pressley Ridge CEO Scott Finnell will keep his position, while the role of Family and Children Services CEO Scott Spangler has not been decided. Contact: (412) 872-9400, www.pressleyridge.org.
The Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council in Redlands, Calif., made Jessica Lawrence the youngest Girl Scouts CEO in the nation. Lawrence, 28, was promoted from chief operating officer in late February and has refocused the organization’s strategic plan toward membership retention. As a fund development director, she helped the council increase its grant revenues from $25,000 per year to $165,000.
The San Gorgonio council serves 15,000 girls in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Contact: (800) 400-4475, www.gssgc.org.
James Cibulka is the new president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. Cibulka was dean of the College of Education at the University of Kentucky and serves on the board of directors of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. He replaces Arthur Wise, who is retiring after 18 years.
NCATE accredits 648 institutions that produce about two-thirds of the nation’s Pre-K, elementary and high school teachers. Contact: (202) 466-7496, www.ncate.org.
Government
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Kim Schmett |
Youth Today reader Kim Schmett, executive director of the Des Moines, Iowa-based Coalition for Family and Children’s Services, checked in to say that he will be leaving his post to pursue change on a grander scale: He is running for the House seat in Iowa’s Third Congressional District.
Schmett ran the coalition, the state’s advocacy group for child welfare providers, for five years. He has also served on the national public policy committee for the Alliance for Children and Families and is the Midwest public policy chairman for the Child Welfare League of America.
A Republican, Schmett will run against one of the Democratic candidates seeking that party’s nomination: either six-term incumbent Rep. Leonard Boswell or Ed Fallon, a former state representative and former candidate for governor.
The juvenile justice world would truly be a duller place in the absence of Earl Dunlap, executive director of the National Juvenile Detention Association.
Fresh off a sojourn to Laurel, Md., to help turn around Oak Hill Academy, Washington, D.C.’s formerly atrocious detention center, Dunlap is now busy fixing the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago, where he is the court-appointed “transitional administrator.”
It didn’t take long for Dunlap, who excels in the art of affronting, to start deep-dishing it out. Cook County Commissioner William Beavers publicly criticized Dunlap for showing up at a board meeting wearing a polo shirt and khakis. Here’s the exchange, as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times:
“Do you own a suit?” Beavers asked. The commissioner has an affinity for designer wares, and reminded Dunlap that “your appearance commands respect.”
Your average consultant at the trough of government takes that reprimand on the chin. Not Dunlap.
“I command respect by the way I conduct myself,” Dunlap retorted, and “the last person I need to be judged by is you.”
Later, he told reporters: “I’ve got bigger fish to fry … than whether I’ve got my Armani suit on.”
Indeed. Contact: NJDA (859) 622-6259, www.njda.com.
Crime
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Jim Hayes |
Love was supposed to be the predicate of everything done at the Fairbanks, Alaska, charity run by a former Fairbank mayor, Pastor Jim Hayes, and his wife, Murilda “Chris” Hayes. It was right there in the nonprofit’s name: LOVE Social Services (LSS), which purported to provide mentoring and tutoring at its youth center and at the Fairbanks Youth Facility, where pre- and post-adjudicated teens are confined.
But the Hayses, who operated primarily with $2.7 million in federal money earmarked for their operation by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) from fiscal 2001 to 2005, will pay with federal prison time for pilfering their own charity. A two-year case, beginning with an FBI raid of LSS offices, ended with a five-and-a-half year sentence for the pastor and a three-year stretch for his wife, who served as director of LSS. Hayes served on the board of directors.
The charges focused on $450,000 siphoned from the program’s funds to help build a new home for Hayes’ Lily of the Valley Church of God in Christ.
“I think Mr. Hayes has done more harm than he realizes to this community and his church,” said presiding District Judge John Sedwick, according to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. The couple will also be expected to pay back the money.
