Click on names for bios.

Allen Sin, Communications and Administrative Associate
Celia Linnea Davis, Deputy Director
Fred Goff, Major Gifts Director & President Emeritus
Lailan Sandra Huen, Research Fellow
Mary Anna C. Colwell, Major Gifts Advisor
Michael Preston, Community Fellow, Indigenous Knowledge Project
miho althea kim, Executive Director
Nat Smith, Bookkeeper
Saba Waheed, Research Director

Volunteers

Lois Kim
Manjula Bhadraswamy
Tammi L. Coles

Interns

Aimee Inglis
Shannon Rohall
Sonya Rifkin

Bios

Allen Sin, Communications and Administrative Associate
ext. 310 allen@datacenter.org
After working in the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority as an Emergency Response Team Member, Allen moved to Oakland and eventually started volunteering at DataCenter in October 2009. He studied at UC Irvine and received a BA in Psychology and Social Behavior, and Criminology, Law, & Society. Currently, Allen is a candidate for Peace Corps service in the Central Asia region. He enjoys photography, writing, traveling, running long distances, and playing music.

Celia Linnea Davis, Deputy Director
ext. 305 celia@datacenter.org
Celia received her MLS (Master’s in Library and Information Science) from Long Island University and her BA in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz. Previously she was Assistant Research Director, General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church. Celia’s role as the Deputy Representative to the United Nations for the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) of El Salvador was to involve the United Nations in mediating negotiations between the FMLN and the government of El Salvador to end the civil war. Celia is fluent in Spanish, has two children and has worked at the DataCenter for over ten years, most recently with environmental justice campaigns in the U.S. and Mexico.

Fred Goff, Major Gifts Director & President Emeritus
ext. 304 fred@datacenter.org
Fred is co-founder and President Emeritus of the DataCenter. In 1966 he co-founded and served 12 years as President of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), from which the DataCenter emerged in 1977. Previously, he worked with the American Friends Service Committee, and in 1966 served as coordinator in Santo Domingo of the Commission on Free Elections in the Dominican Republic. He received his BA in History from Stanford University. Fred has served on the boards of the Funding Exchange, Grassroots Fundraising Journal, and NACLA. In 1997 he was awarded a Gerbode Professional Development Fellowship. In 2007, Fred received the Unsung Hero Award from the Society for Professional Journalists for Excellence in Journalism acknowledging his commitment to making information available to journalists over 30 years. He is currently concentrating on raising an endowment and creating a planned giving program for the DataCenter.

Lailan Sandra Huen, Research Fellow
A graduate of Columbia University in Urban Studies and Ethnic Studies, Lailan’s work focuses on participatory action research that increases the power of grassroots communities in Oakland and the Bay Area to create progressive change. Lailan has worked at Youth In Focus, facilitating youth-led participatory action research projects for education justice, the Avenues Project at East Oakland Community High School, coordinating arts education programs, and Oakland Leaf, developing youth leadership to address interpersonal and institutional violence. She also lived in New York City, working with a range of social justice organizations on media, leadership development, and direct action projects related to immigrant rights, the prison industrial complex, labor rights, and ending violence against women of color. She is working on a Masters in Media Studies at The New School specializing in documentary video and community-based media, and is excited to integrate new media tools into participatory research processes and the grassroots dissemination of relevant information for community change.

Mary Anna C. Colwell, Major Gifts Advisor
Mary Anna received her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of California, Berkeley in Sociology after completing her undergraduate degree at Vassar College and her M.A. at San Francisco State University. Her doctoral dissertation was on “Philanthropic Foundations and Public Policy: The Political Role of Foundations.” She has also written widely on the peace movement. She held teaching positions at U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Davis, and University of San Francisco. Long active in the philanthropic world, she has served as a consultant to grant-makers and donors, and was senior development officer at the Sierra Club. Her past board memberships include Agape Foundation, Capp Street Foundation, Urban Policy Research Institute (Los Angeles) and Northern California SANE. She was one of the founding members and President of the San Francisco Catholic Interracial Council. As Executive Director of LARAS Fund, a private philanthropic foundation disposing of $4 million in assets, Mary Anna gave the first grant the DataCenter received. Shortly after, she began her 10 years of service on our board and more recently, since 2002, has volunteered in our Development Department.

Michael Preston, Community Fellow, Indigenous Knowledge Project
Michael Preston is a young, emerging leader of the Winnemem Wintu tribe. He joined DC as a project partner and intern in 2006. He is leading the three-year Winnemem Wintu Sacred Sites Oral Documentation Project in northern California. Michael was the first in DC’s pilot internship program designed to deepen youth research skills and experience non-profit professional development. After a full year of gaining hands-on research support, collaborative strategizing, and mentoring as a program intern, Michael is now DataCenter’s first Community Fellow under Indigenous Knowledge Project. The project’s research agenda, from shaping questions to interpreting answers, is entirely driven by Michael with the tribe having full ownership. Says Michael, “DC’s unique social justice perspective and commitment to honoring community expertise and experiences has allowed me to craft a project that will truly highlight the voices of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe and demonstrate the incredible power and knowledge the community holds, while at the same time building my own research skills.”

miho althea kim, Executive Director
ext. 302 miho@datacenter.org
Miho is passionate about capacity-building and empowerment: she created programs to teach children and others what she knew, ranging from swimming, piano, to political education in her community since age 13 – and has created numerous academic and political programs and curriculi in Japan, Korea and the United States. Since joining the DataCenter in 2003, Miho helped develop ‘Research Justice’ as DataCenter’s theory of social change, and integrated ‘research’ capacity-building, grounded in popular education approaches, into a larger liberation framework,. As practioner of non-profit leadership committed to social justice values in 501©3, Miho oversees DataCenter’s Shared Leadership Model. As a ‘denationalized’ zainichi Corean woman from apartheid Japan, Miho has facilitated trans-Pacific solidarity for over a decade for cultural sovereignty – and developed the Indigenous Knowledge Project at DataCenter in 2008. In 2008, Miho received the Women’s Human Rights Award in Japan for organizing against state violence against women and colonized communities in Japan.

Nat Smith, Bookkeeper
Nat Smith is a light-skinned Black queer gender variant nerd. Nat loves camping, comix, wildlife, speculative fiction, and mathematical equations, and is proof that none of these things is antithetical to the hood. Nat is an anti-capitalist bookkeeper who only takes on radical non-profits and working class and/or social justice-minded individuals as clients. Nat has been known to associate with such dangerous organizations as Critical Resistance, Trans/Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project and Laney Community College. Nat is doggedly pursuing a degree in wildlife biology/zoology and is hard at work on an anthology entitled Captive Genders, about trans and gender variant communities and the prison industrial complex (PIC), forthcoming next Spring from AK Press. Nat once made a short film about family and identity that has shown in 16 film festivals worldwide. It is now collecting dust. Nat believes that the struggle for liberation, while not involving the election of Obama must be present in all of the work/living that Nat does. You will find Nat championing piracy and challenging military intervention while at the wildlife hospital and casually dropping the “pic abolition” bomb while in line for spicy boneless buffalo wings at Lucky.

Saba Waheed, Research Director
ext. 315 saba@datacenter.org
Prior to joining the DataCenter staff in August 2004, Saba worked at the Urban Justice Center in New York City where she helped to build a Research & Policy Initiative that linked community-based, participatory research and organizing. She received an MA in Anthropology from Columbia University. She brings over eight years of experience in leading and facilitating community-based research projects in collaboration with local and national community groups and alliances and in particular, ways to popularize methods and analysis. In addition to her work at DataCenter, she is also an editor for SAMAR Magazine and producer for the show “Flip the Script” on KPFK.

Volunteers

Lois Kim
After being an employee at UC Berkeley for 10 years, Lois achieved her dream of going back to school to get her degree. While working full time with two children, she attended and graduated Berkeley with a BA in Asian American Studies. Since then, Lois was promoted to become a computer programmer through self study efforts, but has been in search of an opportunity to use her degree and passion for equality and justice. Currently, she volunteers at Shimtuh, a women’s domestic violence program at the Korean Community Center of East Bay. As a new volunteer at the DataCenter, she is excited to serve the community through her work in developing databases.

Manjula Bhadraswamy
Manjula received her master’s in Economics from San Francisco State University (2007). After her graduation, she worked as an intern scholar at UCSF. She was involved in Health policy and Health research studies. She worked with a health economist on electronic health records. Before coming to United States, she worked as a lecturer in India. She taught economics to undergraduate students. At present, she is volunteering at Data center, working on a housing research project.

Tammi L. Coles
Tammi L. Coles is a professional writer and trainer with more than 16 years of progressively responsible leadership in small- and mid-size organizations serving the public interest. Tammi has worn several hats in the nonprofit sector: moving from HIV educator for a regional LGBT health initiative to director of development for a national criminal justice advocacy group. As the owner of Archer Targeted Communication, Tammi currently creates marketing successes for her small business and nonprofit clients. Her long-time friend and our board member Neil Tangri recruited her to the DataCenter to revitalize our website and raise the visibility of the DataCenter’s research and tools among a new generation of web-savvy activists.

Interns

Aimee Inglis
Aimee grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Orange County, California and attended the University of California Irvine, graduating in 2008 with a B.A. in Sociology. With hopes to do her part to strategically improve the world, she traveled to Nashville, Tennessee where she worked alongside a community organizer for several months. From there she was accepted to the Midwest Academy Community Organizing Internship Program, and worked with Food & Water Watch as an organizer on water issues during the summer of 2009. Today she is a volunteer coordinator at a family resource center in Napa. She hopes to use her research skills and knowledge of community organizations to further the important work of DataCenter, and take what she learns here to inform her future academic career in Sociology.

Shannon Rohall
Shannon is a nutritionist by training and a recent Chico State graduate. Having just started at the DataCenter, she is looking forward to supporting the noble objectives of the Data Center as well as the organizations with whom we partner. Her career goal, domestically, includes advocating for the public interest through the development and oversight of programs and polices that increase access to and knowledge of preventative health care for all Californians, although more specifically for low income minorities. It is her hope to expand her interests in preventative care and public advocacy to an international level within the next 10 to 15 years. Her personal pursuits include a passion for the outdoors, be that hiking, climbing, swimming, or rafting. She is a huge supporter of all sustainable endeavors, due to their significant impact on the well being of our planet. Keep California beautiful for all future generations!

Sonya Rifkin
Sonya has been a volunteer with the DataCenter since January 2010, and was an intern in the spring and summer of 2009. She is an Urban Studies major at Mills College, and will be pursuing a Master of Public Policy there, focusing on housing and urban policy. Through DC, she has worked with the Right to the City alliance, as well as community groups in the Southwest, producing corporate profiles on large mining and chemical companies. Prior to interning at the DataCenter, Sonya worked with Mills College and KALW radio as a student reporter, most recently producing a series on redevelopment in Oakland. In summer 2008, she was part of a U.S. youth delegation to Caracas and Mérida, Venezuela, spending time with youth activists and a diverse bunch of leaders, including a brief internship with a community radio station. In her native New York, Sonya organized queer youth through Center Lane community center, worked as a museum educator, and community garden volunteer. Sonya was raised up on picket lines and union songs in New York, and is a believer in community research and history as a tool for lasting change.

The DataCenter is blessed to have served the social justice Movement for over three decades. Some highlights from our past include:

1977
DataCenter—an activist library and publication center—is founded in affiliation with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) by Jon Frappier, Fred Goff, Loretta & Harry Strharsky and 40 dedicated volunteers.

1979
Establish Corporate Profile Project for clients such as United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations & customized research service for immigration attorneys representing Central Americans seeking political asylum.

1980
Publish press profiles, The Reagan File, on Ronald Reagan and his policies on labor, El Salvador, foreign policy, and military policy in Asia.

1981
New Right Project tracks the rise of neo-conservatism; Launch Right-to-know Project in response to censorship & growing restrictions on access to information; Monitor plant closures and layoffs; Publish press profile Toxic Nightmare for free distribution to leading environmental organizations

1983
Expand Search Service to include corporate accountability research to support community, labor, and corporate campaigns and political asylees from all over the world.

1984
Establish Third World Resources quarterly newsletter and specialized resource directories series.

1987
Launch Pro Bono Fund to subsidize services to low-budget social justice organizations.

1988
Search Service goes online.

1991
Launch the Cuba Project/Conexiones to respond to information needs of institutions in Cuba & facilitates information exchange between U.S. and Cuban colleagues for the next ten years; Publish three volumes of press on the First Gulf War.

1993
Launch Freedom of Expression Project & CultureWatch newsletter monitoring the culture wars waged by the Religious Right until 2000.

1994
Conduct first workshop on Research Methods for Community Activists; Partner with Communities for a Better Environment to provide research & training for grassroots toxics activists.

1997
Celebrate our 20th Anniversary with a gala celebration honoring Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, Communities for a Better Environment, The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Progressive Asset Management, Public Media Center, United Farm Workers, & Women’s Educational Media.

1998
Launch Capacity Building Campaign to underwrite new offices and computers for all staff; Implement affirmative action policy to hire organizers from communities of color.

1999
Develop community research training program; Extensive campaign research for the anti-California Proposition 21 Campaign with a coalition of Bay Area groups.

2000
Information Services Latin America (ISLA), a DataCenter project monitoring U.S. press reporting on Latin America, becomes independent on its 30th anniversary; Create our Youth Strategy Project to support the upsurge in youth organizing nationwide. Incorporate popular education methodology in our trainings.

2001
Author the report Moving Stronger: Needs of the criminal justice reform movement based on nationwide surveys & interviews & establish our Criminal Justice Project; Launch Endowment campaign for organizational sustainability

2002
Celebrate our 25th Anniversary with a gala celebration honoring Youth United for Community Action, Southwest Organizing Project, and Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Youth Force Coalition for their Books Not Bars campaign; recognize Fred Goff and Leon Sompolinsky for their years of service to the DataCenter.

2003
Commence Strategic Planning prioritizing Deepening Partnerships with Social Justice groups, Diversifying Our Income & Implementing Anti-Oppression Organizational Culture; Staff is majority people of color for the first time in the organization’s history; Incorporate Participatory research methodology and Decolonizing Research analysis in program work; Diversify Board of Directors.

2006
Launch Shared Leadership model with the assistance of Patricia St. Onge. Support Services, Program & Capacity Building committees lead the organizational work & a representative from each committee serves on Coordinating Council; Mission, Vision & Values finalized

2007
Celebrate 30 years of capacity-building for the Movement and honor All of Us or None, Domestic Workers United, and Mary Anna Colwell; Year 2 Shared Leadership model; Launch Research Justice framework; Launch $2 million sustainability goal for the Endowment

2008
Plan for 30 more years!

…being the change we want to see in the world

By DataCenter with contribution from Patricia St. Onge
Winter 2006

The DataCenter is committed to reflecting our social justice values in all of our organizational practices. In particular, we’ve been engaged in defining, implementing and sustaining concrete practices to dismantle systems of oppression and increase our accountability to communities on the ground. In order to tackle challenges and dysfunction endemic to social justice-minded non-profits, over the last year we have been developing long-term sustainable leadership-in particular by people of color and working class people-by sharing it across the organization. By building on transformative work in the movement, knowledge from people of color communities, and on our own thirty year organizational history of participatory decisionmaking, organizational culture work and anti-oppression work, we’ve successfully piloted and are launching the Shared Leadership organizational structure. We believe there can be a healthy balance between organizational and individual wellbeing and social change work. We believe that leadership of the organization does not belong exclusively to an executive director or the board. Leadership is the work of every person. We believe Shared Leadership works!

faqs

What is the “Shared Leadership Model”?

We define Shared Leadership (SL) as a multiracial structure of sustainable non-profit leadership and governance grounded in Movement-building, our social justice beliefs & values, historical experiences and self-empowerment. Like our “decolonizing research” methodology empowering communities to lead research projects (see Spring/Summer 2005 newsletter), SL proactively bridges the disparities and power dynamics nascent in the 501c3 institution to carve out the space for healthy practices. This model benefits from the roots of participatory democracy in the Haudenosaunee, consensus decision-making and inclusive organizational culture development. It germinates a mutual opportunity to empower a new generation of leaders while enabling cofounder Fred Goff to continue contributing to our longevity and sustainability.

Our goals for SL are to build ownership over the organization by staff and board, to dismantle racism & systems of oppression, to develop long-term, sustainable leadership by people of color and to increase accountability to our stakeholders and constituent groups.

Our Shared Leadership approach is grounded in three key concepts: integrating program and support services, leadership development and leadership rotation.

Integrating program and support functions connects the work of all staff directly to our mission, holding each of us accountable to the communities with whom we work. When the staff person who primarily does criminal justice research shares responsibility for allocating expenses or getting out a grant proposal, that person develops a clearer, deeper understanding of what it takes to make programs happen and gains empowerment and ownership over the financial health of the organization. This work integration is essential in addressing the cycle of burnout and turnover by distributing responsibilities and relieving pressure on any one individual. Another way we are breaking down power dynamics is to value each area of work equally in the organization and reflect that in pay equity.

Building shared leadership depends on supporting new leaders in their role through coaching and professional development. To support our new leadership in development and continuity, a team of coaches-former Interim Executive Director Patricia St. Onge, former Co-Director Carol Cantwell, Lorrie Johnson, and Belma Gonzalez-are respectively providing organizational, financial, development, and founder transition coaching. In this initial phase of implementation and learning, our coaches mentor committees, working groups and individual staff as well as doing organization-wide skills building/literacy trainings for staff and board. In addition to coaching, each staff member also has discretionary funds for individual professional development. Our next step is to engage in organizational assessment and development.

Leadership rotation enables all staff to assume responsibility and develop skills over time in all aspects of operating and representing the organization. This builds leadership and a culture of power-sharing, while minimizing the isolation and negative impacts of concentration of power that can accrue to individuals in leadership positions over time. Staggered rotation also ensures organizational continuity and stability in the event of staff transition.

How does Shared Leadership work?

Our SL model consists of the Coordinating Council, three committees, working groups and the board. The Coordinating Council holds responsibility for keeping the organization on track with our mission, vision and strategy, and organizational legal, financial and community accountabilities. The Council is comprised of three staff members, each of whom is engaged in and represents a key area of the organization’s work: Research, Capacity-Building, and Support Services Committees. Council tenures rotate on a staggered cycle among each committee’s members giving everyone the opportunity to serve while maintaining structural continuity.

The three committees coordinate programmatic and support services work. Every staff member sits on one of the committees, engages in the work and ensures that program and support services function well. Committees are responsible for ensuring staff members are supported in their work and that they are meeting their responsibilities.

Working groups handle the day-to-day tasks of the organization: supporting community-based research, transferring research capacity to communities, providing research support to social justice efforts, fundraising, bookkeeping, financial management, governance, operations, communications, human rights/resources. Staff collaboration in operating the organization helps ensure that organizational knowledge is shared, not lost when staff members move out of the organization.

What role does the board of directors play in SLM?

Shared leadership impacts the entirety of the organization, board as well as staff. Our board fully supported the DataCenter’s shift to a shared leadership structure and new board members are committed to helping the organization envision and implement a role for the board that honors and reflects shared leadership principles balances legal & fiduciary responsibility. To really ground our work and hold us accountable, our new board members reflect our constituency, that is they are themselves organizers and leaders from the community groups we work with. Membership on our board means involvement in legal & fiduciary responsibility, organizational development, resource development, and anti-oppression work in order to effectively steward the organization into the future. To support board leadership, the organization commits resources to develop their abilities around financial literacy and management, endowment stewardship, among others. Currently, the board is revising our bylaws to ensure they are legally compliant and reflect the new structure.

Who makes decisions?

Those who are most impacted by a decision make the decision. This means that everyone participates in major organizational decisions, while committees, working groups and individuals have the autonomy to make decisions that fall within their scope of responsibility. We practice participation and transparency, and work to balance those principles with effective decision-making.

Why Shared Leadership?

The social justice movement has experimented with reforming and internalizing the corporate model for social change purposes via the 501c3 structure for several decades. The contradiction between the hierarchical corporate model and social justice values has been the downfall of many an organization. And so the critique of the 501c3 model has been gathering momentum in movement building spaces.
Without attentiveness to and intentionality about power, we are deluding ourselves into re-creating the very systems of oppression we seek to dismantle. Our SL is but one holistic endeavor among others to be real about power and how it plays out, to empower all staff and board, to integrate and value the well-being of staff and organization, and create healthy ways to practice power resonant with our politics.

While we recognize no structure is without its challenges, we value the peer support and stability that shared leadership provides. Three years ago we learned the importance of undertaking a cultural transformation to become a multiracial organization that is truly a shared and equitable space for people of color and white allies. Our shared leadership structure has grown out of our experience and needs as we build a space for sustainable multiracial leadership that in turn will inform our work to dismantle power inequities in research and strengthen the movement for social justice and liberation.

We are indebted to former staff, directors and board members who have been teachers along the way. Financial security and support from key funders, donors, our endowment enabled us to build and implement this structure. We are especially grateful to Patricia St. Onge who has nurtured the shared leadership structure from seedling. Her support and vision has been instrumental in helping us to take that first scary step with a leap of faith.

We are in progress, documenting the successes & challenges, and would love to hear from folks their experiences or ways that they would like to support…