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Upleveling Governance: A Cohort for Foundation Trustees and CEOs

Foundation boards have tremendous potential to reimagine philanthropic governance and leadership. Good governance involves mindsets, tools, and practices that foster frank conversation, reveal power inequities, and harness the contributions of people with diverse lived experiences. Mission-aligned leadership contributes to more purposeful and effective board meetings and creates space for strategic conversation that propel bolder practice. 

Informed by a roster of longtime philanthropic leaders, Upleveling Governance for Transformative Philanthropy will help foundation trustees and executive leaders: 

  • Clarify the role of the board
  • Interrogate who sits at the table and why
  • Explore ways to align all foundation assets to support mission
  • Identify questions your board should be exploring to meet this moment and contribute to a future where all beings, and our planet, can thrive

Leaders will leave the program having identified the changes that they wish to commit to and will develop a plan to guide work towards those goals.  

In partnership with Northern California Grantmakers and Philanthropy New York, GEO invites foundation CEOs and EDs and their Trustees to join us for this 3-month cohort program with peers committed to unlocking the power in governance to fuel more transformative philanthropic practice and lasting social change. We’ll explore case studies, engage in reflective practices, and share frameworks and tools to help you cultivate an increasingly effective and connected board while building a community of peers similarly committed. 

Who Should Participate

Participants should meet one of the following criteria:

  • Foundation leaders managing boards who know governance can look and feel different (more purposeful, strategic, and easeful), and desire to make change
  • Foundation leaders managing their boards who want some momentum and community to get started making shifts in governance
  • Board members who have an appetite for effective governance that moves beyond the traditional roles associated with legal requirements and tax structures
  • Board members who sense that their governance efforts could do more to advance their mission, such as: Recently joined foundation trustees, newer chairs, newer family members, and/or community members

Number of Participants per Organization

We highly recommend that leadership+trustee pairs join: for example, a CEO or ED and a board member.

September 17, 2025 – 1:30 – 3:30 pm ET

 How can philanthropy best meet the challenges of these times? How can philanthropic leadership – CEOs, EDs and Trustees – lead boldly and transformatively towards systems change efforts and ways of working that emphasize the good of the collective over the egos of institutions or individuals? Come hear an invitation to be part of reimagining philanthropic governance for 2025 and beyond.  

Faculty:

Dimple Abichandani, Philanthropic leader, Lawyer, Advisor, and Author of A New Era of Philanthropy, Ten Practices to Transform Wealth into a More Just and Sustainable Future

September 30, 2025 – 1:30 – 3:30 pm ET

Clarity is contagious! The first element of improved board practice involves clarifying the role of the board and individual board members’ roles and associated expectations. Though historically the board has been upheld primarily as the agents of fiduciary responsibility and accountability, case studies reveal that the most effective boards balance strategic, generative, and fiduciary dimensions of leadership and accountability. In this session, we’ll explore the conceptual frame of Purpose-Driven Board Leadership (PDBL) and identify practices that enliven it. We’ll get clear about ways to ensure expectations of and agreements among board members grease the gears of effective and easeful governance.

Faculty:

  • Monika Kalra Varma, President + CEO, BoardSource 
  • Candice Jones, President + CEO, Public Welfare Foundation

October 16, 2025 – 3:00 – 5:00 pm ET

Are you making room for leadership transition in your board? Are you wanting to recruit board members more representative of the communities affected by your grantmaking & operations? Have you had a deeper conversation about who governs and why and who truly holds and wields power within your organization? Have you thoughtfully discussed whose money we are stewarding? In this session we’ll discuss why these questions are important when you’re undertaking the project of “diversifying” your board. We’ll hear points of view and lessons learned from the longtime philanthropic leaders who have made these changes. Finally, we’ll chart a course from where you and your board might be to a vision of governance that allows for dignified leadership of people of color without compromising anyone’s contribution to strategy or accountability.

Faculty:

  • Gabriela Alcalde, Executive Director, Elmina B. Sewall Foundation
  • Jono Anzalone, Board Chair, Elmina B. Sewall Foundation

October 30, 2025 – 1:30 – 3:30 pm ET 

Has your board recently had a deep conversation about asset-mission alignment? And about how both of these link to your foundation’s strategy? We will hear from two seasoned leaders who have stewarded assets in alignment with their foundation’s values. Regardless of your foundation’s time horizon for spending, learn how to make decisions that ensure that fiduciary and programmatic goals go hand-in-hand. In this session we’ll visit key issues of power and control, affluence and influence. We’ll probe:  Who controls the assets and with what pace are they deployed?

Faculty:

  • June Wilson, Executive Director, Compton Foundation
  • Rickke Mananzala, President, New York Foundation; Trustee, Public Welfare Foundation

November 10, 2025 – 1:30 – 3:30 pm ET 

In this working session, we’ll get down to brass tacks. We’ll talk about the Generative/Strategic role of the board and what this looks and feels like operationally. We’ll plunge in: What questions should the board be exploring together right now? How does the board address them? 

Based on the learning and action possibilities explored in all previous sessions, we will gather together in this final session to ensure that participants have an opportunity to finalize their needs and plans for future board development. We will focus particularly on the specific change(s) to which you want to commit, identifying who you need to involve, and identifying necessary resources and actions needed to make progress towards goals. We’ll have time to reflect on insights, lingering questions, and to begin to develop a plan for your ongoing journey (ideally with a partner pair from this cohort!). Close with Commitment Exercise and Accountability. 

Faculty: 

  • Ellen LaPointe, Managing Director, NPAG

Grantmaking Range Member Price Non-Member Price 
Up to $5M $750 $1125
$5-$25M $1000 $1500
Above $25M $1500 $2250

Dimple Abichandani is a nationally recognized philanthropic leader, lawyer, and author of A New Era of Philanthropy: Ten Practices to Transform Wealth Into a More Just and Sustainable Future, a book that reimagines how philanthropy can meet this moment.

For two decades, she has worked to reshape philanthropy’s purpose and practice while leading innovative funding institutions. As Executive Director of the General Service Foundation (2015–2022), she aligned the foundation’s grantmaking, investments, and governance with justice values. She was the founding director of the Rise Together Fund, a donor collaborative at the Proteus Fund, and previously led the Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law.

A National Center for Family Philanthropy Fellow, Dimple’s leadership has been recognized with a Scrivener Award for Creative Grantmaking. She serves on the Board of Directors of Solidaire Network and has served on the boards/steering committees of the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, Northern California Grantmakers, and Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees.Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she advises donors and foundations on transforming wealth into a just and sustainable future.

Learn more here.

Dr. Gabriela Alcalde has served as the Executive Director of the Sewall Foundation, a private independent foundation serving Maine and Wabanaki communities, since 2019. She is a creative, anti-supremacist leader with decades of experience in the nonprofit, philanthropic, higher education, and grassroots sectors. Her formal education is in public health, and she is motivated by a commitment to prevent unnecessary suffering. She was born and raised in Peru, and her experience as an immigrant deeply informs her worldview and approach to leadership and change. Gabriela is author of the book, What Your Comfort Costs Us.

Learn more here.

Dr. Jono Anzalone is a professor of Economics and Chair of the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation. A Truman National Security Fellow and former senior executive with the Red Cross, he has led disaster response and climate resilience efforts across more than 30 countries. He also founded The Climate Initiative, aiming to empower one million youth in climate action. Jono holds graduate degrees in economics, accounting, and education, and lives in Maine with his husband, Andy, and their Golden Doodle, Penni.

Learn more here.

Monika is the President & CEO of BoardSource, a globally recognized organization dedicated to creating and strengthening governance and leadership systems that enable nonprofit organizations and civil society to fulfill their purpose and missions. For over thirty years, BoardSource has been at the forefront of nonprofit board leadership, research, and support.

Monika brings over twenty dedicated years leading human rights and social justice organizations in the United States and abroad. From 2017-2021, she served as the Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area (LCCRSF), the oldest civil rights institution on the West Coast. Monika and her team partnered with local communities to advance racial, immigrant, and economic rights. She led an organizational transformation at every level. As a result, the LCCRSF’s staff size nearly tripled, the organization’s revenue and budget doubled, and the organizational culture transformed to center staff well-being.

Monika also served as the Director of the Center for Human Rights at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights (RFK Center) where she advanced human rights through partnerships with social movement leaders around the globe. Monika was the Executive Director of the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Center, the largest provider of pro bono legal services in the District of Columbia serving 20,000 individuals, nonprofit organizations, and small businesses, and also served on the D.C. Bar’s executive team. She began her career with the Office of the Prosecutor at the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Monika currently serves on the Board of Advisors for the Foundation for System Change.

Monika has dedicated her career to community-centered work, guided by the belief the solutions to the most entrenched human rights and social justice challenges are found in the communities most impacted by those challenges- and a deep commitment to building and creating systems that will one day enable everyone to live out their dreams.

Learn more here.

Ellen LaPointe is a seasoned nonprofit executive who has held C-suite and other senior leadership roles in organizations focused on LGBTQIA+/HIV health care, research and advocacy; philanthropy; technology-centered approaches to advancing well-being; law; and intersectional equity and social justice throughout her career. Ellen’s national practice at NPAG includes retained executive search in philanthropy and in legal and health-focused nonprofits, board and executive level strategic advisory services, succession planning, executive coaching, and outplacement support.

Most recently, Ellen was Chief Executive Officer of Fenway Health, a $145 million, 600-person nonprofit that advocates for and delivers innovative, equitable, accessible health care, supportive services, and transformative research and education to over 33,000 LGBTQIA+ people and people from other underserved communities annually. Prior to joining Fenway, Ellen was President and Chief Executive Officer of Northern California Grantmakers, a nonprofit that brings together Bay Area philanthropy to advance the common good, and Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at HopeLab, a nonprofit founded by The Omidyar Group that develops technology-based approaches to advance health and well-being in young people. She has served on several nonprofit boards throughout her career, including YW Boston, the United Philanthropy Forum, Lambda Literary, and OneJustice.

Ellen is a strategist, a highly relational connector, and a skilled communicator and facilitator, adept at working with boards, senior leadership, staff, and members of the community to identify and achieve shared goals. A hallmark of her impact throughout her career has been her ability to recruit, cultivate, and retain strong, mission-driven leaders and teams that are united in their capacity to deliver on a vision for a better future. Ellen has also successfully led organizations engaged in large-scale, transformative initiatives to center and advance racial and other intersectional equity in their efforts and impact. Through intention and experience, Ellen has come to appreciate that meaningful and sustained team diversity is what happens when organizations engage authentically to cultivate workplace environments that support equity and belonging.

Ellen earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University and her Juris Doctor degree from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. She is a proud native and resident of Maine where she lives with her wife, just a block from the beach she grew up going to with her mom as a kid.

Learn more here.

Rickke Mananzala (he/him/his) has been active in grassroots organizing, advocacy, and social justice philanthropy in service of racial, economic, and gender justice movements for more than two decades. He currently serves as the President of the New York Foundation, which supports community organizing and advocacy towards a more just and inclusive New York City. He previously served as Vice President of Programs at Borealis Philanthropy, a philanthropic intermediary that brings funders together to support leaders, organizations, and grassroots movements in their efforts to build power for transformative change.

Rickke’s roots are in grassroots organizing, including serving as an organizer and eventually the Executive Director of FIERCE, a grassroots organization for LGBTQ youth of color in New York City that spearheaded campaigns to challenge youth criminalization. He was a New Voices Fellow at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project where he worked to integrate legal services, litigation, and policy advocacy to support organizing by and for low-income transgender people in New York City. Rickke was a founding board member of the Right to the City Alliance and served on the board Funders for LGBTQ Issues and the Third Wave Foundation (now Third Wave Fund) where he helped develop grantmaking strategies to support feminist youth organizing work across the U.S. He is currently a board member of the Public Welfare Foundation and Philanthropy New York.

Rickke received his B.A. in political science from Columbia University and Master of Public Administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs with a focus on urban policy.

Learn more here.

June Wilson, Executive Director of the Compton Foundation, is a dedicated cultural and community organizer who has engaged performing arts and neighborhood-based organizations as well as executive leaders and family foundations in designing and implementing approaches that cultivate racially just spaces, free from all forms of supremacy. A celebrated philanthropic leader in the practices of racial justice and alternative approaches to legacy and perpetuity, June previously stewarded the Quixote Foundation in Seattle, Washington through its “Spend Up” and sunset. Bring the same affirmative approach to fulfill the Compton Foundation’s mission and purpose, June will guide Compton Foundation’s Spend Up by 2025 using strategies grounded in relational repair, return of assets, and reparative actions. This initiative will expand philanthropic foundation’s typical redistribution of resources beyond grantmaking and impact investing to include a new model of reparative action that extends backwards and forwards in time, affecting individuals, communities, and the land that sustains them. Compton Foundation’s emergent and evolving Reparative Action Institute springs from June’s deep knowledge of the interplay between philanthropic practice and community engagement intended to transform supremacist systems into liberatory, life-affirming ones.

Learn more here.

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