Fwd: Local pilot updates: Bay Area team fully funded, DC onboarding

[Greg Bloom]

Hey folks - see below...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Greg Bloom <bl...@codeforamerica.org>
Date: Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 5:42 PM
Subject: Local pilot updates: Bay Area team fully funded, DC onboarding
To: "OpenRe...@googlegroups.com" <openre...@googlegroups.com>

Hi folks - 

Some exciting updates to share. (For some important background, read through my expanded FAQ if you haven't yet.)

This past month, a number of funders have made initial investments in this process. Most of these investments have been from foundations to build our San Francisco Bay Area pilot team, totaling about $120k. I helped drive this fundraising effort in partnership with Code for America (though I want to clarify up front that this funding is going neither to CfA nor to Open Referral; rather, these foundations are contracting directly with local organizers and participating organizations).

Details: The Serving California Foundation is contributing $65k to this team -- and as such they will be directly contracting our Bay Area Project Lead, and providing him with a modest discretionary budget. (You'll hear from Sameer Siruguri shortly :) The rest of the funding is split about evenly between the Kapor Center, which is contracting a consultant to design our 'community-based evaluation' process, and the California Health Care Foundation, which is contracting Stewards of Change to facilitate our first symposium (more details on that soon too). 

Our DC team, meanwhile, has secured a $25k pledge from a private donor -- this funding is contingent upon a few matching gifts of comparable size, which I'm confident we'll secure soon enough. (DC is farther behind San Francisco in funding, but actually somewhat ahead of the pack in terms of stakeholder leadership -- they have a number of organizations already committed to be a part of the leadership team, along with buy-in from the government agency that runs DC 2-1-1.)

Our local Project Leads in both SF and DC are onboarding this week and starting to assemble their teams. 

I can't stress enough how excited I am to be working with them. You'll hear from them here soon enough! 

Onwards,
Greg