Meet our members!  AFN’s greatest asset is our members—a diverse network of national, regional, and community-based foundations, financial institutions, and grantmakers—investing in advancing economic opportunity and prosperity.  Check back each month and meet your peers!   

1: What’s your main interest/focus on asset building in 2020?

RCF Connects has equity as its core value and goal, and mobilizes the power of connection to build healthy, thriving communities. Ensuring that all people from every community in Contra Costa can build the assets they need to participate fully and achieve their full potential is key to this work. COVID-19 has heightened inequities faced by many in our community, so it is an important time for philanthropy to operate differently, to be truly community-driven and equity-focused, and to consciously look for ways to align and integrate funding priorities and resources.

 

2: What’s the most “ah-ha” provoking new book or research that you’ve read in the past year?

Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva. It was incredibly inspiring and eye-opening to think about how wealth can better serve the needs of communities of color and atone for ways it has traditionally been used to inflict harm and perpetuate inequities. It offers thoughtful and practical steps towards healing that can help philanthropy better align resources and practices with values, and ways that philanthropy as a field can embody its definition: love of humanity.

 

3: What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from a grantee or a colleague?

I learn every day from my colleagues at RCF Connects, and from the partners we work with and support. However, the most important lesson I have learned was participating with colleagues in the Leadership for Equity and Opportunity Program, which focuses on creating sustainable positive change in our communities. The key to this long-term change is a full-spectrum approach founded in universal human values, such as equity, compassion or justice, with conscious focus on systems and narratives that need to be shifted as well as technical solutions to generate the change. Aligning around universal values really works – I have seen changes both inside our organization and in the field as a whole, especially in this moment of global crisis.

 

4: What’s the first concert you ever attended? 

I grew up in New York City and my mother was a trained classical pianist, so music has always been in our family. The first concert I attended was the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, a student matinee when I was in elementary school! Otherwise, my first rock concert was INXS when I was in high school.

 


About Stacey Street, Chief Operations Officer, RCF Connects (formerly Richmond Community Foundation)

Stacey works in partnership with the President and CEO to lead and guide all the company’s operations. This includes fundraising, marketing/communications, human resources, and providing supervision to all program directors, as well as working closely with the CEO and Board of Trustees on strategic planning and implementation.