Guest Speaker: Jean Ross, Executive Director, California Budget Project
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
6:30-8:30pm
Fish and Farm Restaurant, San Francisco
Registration Required: Deadline, Friday September 2, 2011
Foundation Trustees, including County and State First 5 Commissioners, are invited to join GCYF for the 2011 Annual Trustee Dinner, featuring guest speaker Jean Ross, Executive Director of the California Budget Project. The Dinner will be held in conjunction with the GCYF Annual Conference, “What Counts and What Works: People, Practice and Policy”, taking place in September 2011 in San Francisco.
San Francisco: Our Host City and Region
The city of San Francisco is the financial, cultural and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a regional and global center for innovation. The region is home to a robust philanthropic and non-profit community, as well as extensive public/private sector partnerships, engaged in strengthening supports and services for children, youth, and families. The region is an ideal setting for this year’s conference as well as the Trustee Dinner, exploring public and private funders working together for not only improved, but exceptional outcomes for communities.
Attendees
The Trustee Dinner offers an intimate opportunity for collegial networking among foundation trustees interested in children, youth and family issues. It also provides a forum for networking and sharing around the role of Trustees in philanthropic efforts to address critical CYF issues their foundation communities.
Traditionally, GCYF’s Annual Trustee dinner is an exclusive event for Trustees of GCYF member foundations and other foundation trustees attending the conference or located in the conference host city and region. Building on California’s unique public funding structure for early childhood education, GCYF welcomes County and State First 5 Commissioners as fellow Trustees for this dinner.1
Program
Guest speaker Jean Ross, Executive Director of the California Budget Project and nationally known expert on state fiscal and economic policy issues, will set the context for our discussion. Sharing lessons from California’s experience in weaving together a diverse network of funding and resources to support early childhood services, Ms. Ross will explore the implications of recent state budget crisis and their impact on low- and middle-income communities, as well as the interplay between state and federal budget and policy issues impacting communities across the country.
Following Ms. Ross’s framing remarks, Trustee Dinner Co-Chairs, Al Castle of the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation, Bob Kirkwood of the Bella Vista Foundation, and Beverly Buck of the Aloha Foundation will engage attendees in an informal discussion over dinner. During the dinner participants will have the opportunity to engage Ms. Ross and each other to consider ways to work better with other funders, including business and government, to maximize resources directed to improving the lives of children, youth and families.
The Trustee Dinner presents a rare opportunity to share what private and public funders are doing to forge alliances for children and youth. This year’s dinner will allow us to:
- Hear from San Francisco and national colleagues about innovative practices, collaborative efforts, and examples of success and/or failure in creative funding strategies in a very difficult economy;
- Distill lessons from the San Francisco Bay area and explore how to build on those lessons in our daily work; and
- Explore the special role that foundation trustees and Commissioners play that even the best staff cannot play.
Registration – Deadline: Friday, September 2, 2011
The cost of the event is $75 per person. Attendance at the full conference is not required to attend the Trustee Dinner although we do hope you will consider joining us for both. To register for ONLY the Trustee Dinner, complete the registration form. 
To register for the GCYF conference and Trustee Dinner, please register now. Space is limited for this event. Please register early as we expect this event to sell out quickly.
If you have any questions about the dinner logistics or program, please feel free to contact Bernadette Badio, GCYF’s administrative services manager, at 301-589-4293 or bbadio@gcyf.org.
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Guest Speaker Bio
JEAN ROSS
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
CALIFORNIA BUDGET PROJECT
Jean Ross joined the California Budget Project (CBP) as its first executive director in 1995. The CBP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization established to promote a better understanding of state fiscal and economic policy issues and their impact on low- and- middle income Californians. Her prior professional experience includes serving as Principal Consultant to the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee; Senior Consultant to the Assembly Human Services Committee, where she staffed the California Legislature’s Joint Select Committee on the Changing Family; and Assistant Research Director of the Service Employees International Union in Washington, DC, where she was responsible for coordinating the union’s research on tax, budget, and employment policy issues. Jean serves on the Board of the Washington, DC-based Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy; the Advisory Board of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution; the Advisory Committee of California’s Franchise Tax Board; and the Board of the California Tax Reform Association. Ms. Ross is a frequent speaker on fiscal and economic policy issues and has published numerous reports and articles. She has authored articles published by the Los Angeles Times, Sacramento Bee, State Tax Notes, San Francisco Chronicle, San Diego Union Tribune, UC Berkeley’s Intergovernmental Studies Press, Cornell University Press, National Academy Press, and other publications.
Ms. Ross graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz and has a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning with a concentration in Regional Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Ms. Ross was selected as a Senior Fellow of the University of California, Los Angeles’ School of Public Policy and Social Research in 2000-01.
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1First 5 Commissions were established as a result of the 1998 the passage of the California Children and Families Act (Proposition 10) which added a 50-cent tax to each pack of cigarettes sold to fund a comprehensive system of early childhood development. A share of Proposition 10 funding goes to a state First 5 Commission, and the rest is distributed to local communities through the state’s 58 autonomous county First 5 Commissions. First 5 Commissions direct funding and resources to public and community-based early childhood education and supports in communities, including high-quality preschool, health services, child care, and other crucial programs that support families and communities to improve the health, development, well-being and school readiness of children aged 0-5.