Board Bios

Pamela H. David
Board Chair

Pam David has served as the Executive Director of the Walter & Elise Haas Fund since 2002. The Fund's mission is to help build a healthy, just, and vibrant society in which people feel connected to and responsible for their community. The Fund seeks to build meaningful community engagement through its work in the arts, economic development, public education, and Jewish life.

Prior to joining the Haas Fund, Pam headed San Francisco's Mayor's Office of Community Development. She also played an instrumental role in formulating and implementing San Francisco's progressive welfare reform programs and strategies, and addressing the non-profit space crisis during the dot com boom. Pam has had a long career as a community organizer on a range of issues, including advising Reverend Jesse Jackson on lesbian/gay and women's issues during the 1988 presidential campaign. She currently serves on several philanthropic boards, including Northern California Grantmakers and PACE (Philanthropists for Active Civic Engagement).

Fatima Angeles
Board Member

Fatima Angeles joined the Foundation in 1998 as a program director, where she managed the Foundation's Children and Youth Community Health Initiative and oversaw grantmaking in two issues: environmental health and work and health. As director of organizational learning, she directs the Foundation's program assessment and evaluation functions, provides consultation to program staff on evaluation issues and develops programs to promote learning in those areas. Prior to joining TCWF, Angeles was a program associate at The Hasbro Children's Foundation in New York City. Prior to that, she was director of the South of Market Teen Center in San Francisco and project coordinator for Asian American Communities Against AIDS.

Angeles is a 1992 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and received her master of public health degree from Columbia University in 1997. Angeles is a board member of the Asian and Pacific Islander Health Forum, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the health and well-being of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. She has also served as a board member of the Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center and Funders Concerned About AIDS.

Emmett Carson
Board Member

Emmett D. Carson is internationally recognized as a catalyst for progressive social change. A renowned speaker, he has published over 75 works on philanthropy and social justice.

Prior to his appointment as CEO and president of Silicon Valley Community Foundation in August 2006, Emmett served for 12 years as president and CEO of The Minneapolis Foundation, where he pioneered several community initiatives and increased assets from $186 million to over $600 million. Previously, Emmett served as the first manager of the Ford Foundation's worldwide grantmaking program on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. He also has worked for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the Congressional Research Service.

Emmett serves on several nonprofit boards including the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, Southern Education Foundation and the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Policy. He is the recipient of several nonprofit leadership awards and has been recognized several times by The Nonprofit Times as one of the 50 most influential nonprofit leaders in the United States.

Emmett received his Ph.D. and a master in public administration in public and international affairs from Princeton University and a bachelor's degree in economics, Phi Beta Kappa, from Morehouse College. He is married to Jacqueline Copeland-Carson, Ph.D., and together they have the privilege, pleasure and occasional challenge of raising a teenage daughter.

Alexa Cortes Culwell
Board Member

From 1992-2005, Alexa served as the first CEO of the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, directing its program development and growth. Alexa is an active board member of several organizations focused on foundation effectiveness, including the Center for Effective Philanthropy and Northern California Grantmakers. In addition, she is serving as the chairperson for the 2006 National Conference for Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. She is also the chair of the board of Golden Gate Community, Inc., an organization in San Francisco that operates businesses that employ at-risk and homeless youth. Alexa speaks and writes to audiences around the country about the importance of foundations being accountable for positive social impact and the capacity challenges of nonprofits, particularly in the area of leadership, governance and measurable impact.

Chris DeCardy
Board Member

Chris DeCardy joined the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 2002 and is vice president and director of communications. Chris manages the integration of the Foundation's communications, evaluation, organizational effectiveness and local grantmaking, grants management, and program-related investments. He leads annual cross-Foundation initiatives to improve program impact and works closely with the president and CEO on day-to-day operations. He is also responsible for developing and implementing external affairs strategies across the Foundation and provides counsel in developing program-specific communications efforts, including those designed to build communications capacity of Foundation grantees.

Before joining the Foundation, Chris worked for seven years at Environmental Media Services (EMS), first as associate director and then as executive director from 1998 to 2002. At EMS, he designed and implemented campaigns to improve and expand media coverage of environmental issues.

Chris holds a degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin and a master's degree in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He received the Silver Anvil Award for his role in designing and implementing the "Give Swordfish a Break" campaign with SeaWeb and the Natural Resources Defense Council. He is a founder and serves on the board of the Green Media Toolshed.

Christine Elbel
Secretary

Christine Elbel has been the Executive Director of the Fleishhacker Foundation since 1990. Established in 1947, the Fleishhacker Foundation is a family foundation which funds Arts & Culture and Precollegiate Education in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Prior to her position with the Fleishhacker Foundation, Ms. Elbel was a consultant to the nonprofit sector, specializing in strategic planning and fundraising. She also conducted grant monitoring and evaluation for public and private funding agencies. Past arts management positions included serving as Executive Director of Dance Bay Area, a regional dance service organization. She also has a background in institutional advancement for schools and colleges. Her B.A. in Fine Arts and M.S. in Education are both from Indiana University at Bloomington.

Ms. Elbel is an active member of Northern California Grantmakers, and sits on its Board of Directors, as well as the steering committees of the Family Philanthropy Exchange and Arts Loan Fund. She is currently part of the Council on Foundations' 2006 Conference program committee, and is on the Family Foundation Services' publications advisory committee.

Her community service has included several terms as President of both the Joe Goode Performance Group and Presidio Hill School in San Francisco. She is currently on the Board of Trustees of Drew High School.

Tessie Guillermo
Board Member

Tessie Guillermo is President and CEO of the ZeroDivide. Ms. Guillermo is a co-founder and former Chair of the ZeroDivide Board of Directors. Prior to this, she served for 15 years as CEO of the Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum, a leading national health policy organization. Throughout her career as an advocate for underserved communities, she has promoted issues of health and technology access, services and equity. Ms. Guillermo co-founded many nonprofit organizations, including the California Pan Ethnic Health Network, the Community Technology Policy Council and the National Coalition of Asian Pacific Americans. She has received numerous community leadership awards. In 2000, she was appointed by former President Bill Clinton to serve as an inaugural member of the President's Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Ms. Guillermo currently serves on Boards of Directors of The California Endowment, a $3 billion philanthropy in California and Catholic Healthcare West, the largest hospital system in the state.

Ms. Guillermo is a published author and a frequent keynote speaker on non-profit leadership and public policy issues. She is an alumnus of California State University, Hayward, a graduate of the Gallup Leadership Institute and was a 1997 Fellow of the Asian Pacific American Women's Leadership Institute. She is a native San Franciscan, where she and her husband raise their three children.

James Head
Treasurer

James W. Head is the Foundation's director of programs and has over 20 years of experience in the field of community and economic development. For the last 17 years Mr. Head has served as president of the National Economic Development and Law Center. A lawyer by training, Mr. Head has significant nonprofit management, programmatic, and legal experience and has worked on nonprofit legal issues, as a consultant to foundations and government, and as a professor of law.

As director of programs, Mr. Head is responsible for guiding a broad range of program areas and sustaining the vitality of the Foundation's community grantmaking. He currently serves as Legal Counsel of the California Community Economic Development Association, on the Community Advisory Board of Union Bank of California, as member and past Board President of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, and on the Advisory Board of the Open Society Foundation of New York.

He has previously served as an advisor for the 2001 Race Commission in Cincinnati, Ohio, as member of the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board, and was a founding board member of the California Community Economic Development Lending Initiative. Mr. Head holds a Bachelors degree from the University of Georgia and a law degree from the University of Georgia School of Law. He holds state bar memberships in Georgia, Florida, and California.

Carla Javits
Board Member

As REDF's President Carla sets organizational strategy in partnership with the Board of Directors and oversees its operations. Under her leadership, REDF helps to create and grow new businesses to employ very poor people who otherwise are not likely to find or keep a job. She also oversees REDF's efforts to build the field by broadly sharing the results of its extensive, multi-year effort to measure outcomes that demonstrate the effectiveness of social enterprise in helping people with multiple barriers move into the workforce.

Prior to joining REDF, Carla was with the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH) for fifteen years, leading it for the last six. By the end of her tenure, CSH had committed nearly $124 million in loans and grants to support the creation of more than 16,000 units of supportive housing that were operational, with 10,500 more units in the pipeline. She has also worked as a policy and budget analyst for the State of California and as Director of Policy and Planning for the San Francisco Department of Social Services. Carla is currently serving on the Boards of Directors of The Philanthropic Initiative and the California Housing Finance Agency. She holds both a Masters of Public Policy and B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Lise Maisano
Vice Chair at Large

Lise Maisano has been with the S.H. Cowell Foundation since 1990. In the early years, she served as a Program Officer responsible for many of the program areas funded by the Foundation, including youth development, child care, and the prevention of domestic violence and child abuse and neglect. Most recently she served as the Senior Program Officer and was responsible for developing the Family Resource Center program area. Lise was appointed the Foundation's Director of Grants and assumed this position January 2006.

For the ten years prior to joining the Cowell Foundation she worked with non-profit organizations. She was the Development Director for the Giarretto Institute and an intern, then consultant, with the Peninsula Community Foundation.

Raised in San Francisco, Lise attended City public schools, received a BA in Social Relations from Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles and a MA in Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

June Sugiyama
Board Member

June Sugiyama is the Director of the Vodafone-US Foundation. Located in Walnut Creek, the Foundation supports programs mainly in the East Bay with priorities focused on families, children & youth, leadership development, civic participation & urban issues, the arts, and some special projects. Vodafone-US Foundation is affiliated with Vodafone Americas Inc., part of the worldwide British wireless telecommunications company called Vodafone Group Plc. Headquartered in the UK, Vodafone is considered one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, with over 60,000 employees and operations in 27 countries across five continents. It currently holds 45% interest in Verizon Wireless in the United States.

June serves on the Board of Northern California Grantmakers. She also served on the board of the National Japanese American Historical Society, the Business Arts Council in San Francisco and Nobiru-kai, a Japanese newcomers association. June received her teaching credential and Liberal Studies degree at San Francisco State University, Masters degree and specialist credential at University of San Francisco, and has teaching experience with schools throughout the Bay Area, especially in the Japanese Bilingual Programs. She's held the position at the Vodafone-US Foundation for the past seven years.

Stephen Toben
Board Member

Steve Toben is the president of the Flora Family Foundation in Menlo Park, which supports the philanthropic activities of the descendants of Bill Hewlett, co-founder of the Hewlett-Packard Company. Interests of the Flora Family Foundation include international development, the environment, K-12 education, and arts, culture and humanities. Before coming to the Flora Family Foundation in 2000, Mr. Toben served nine years as a program officer at the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation where he directed the Foundation's programs on environment and conflict resolution. In 2001 he received a Peacemaker/Peacebuilder Award from the National Peace Foundation in Washington for his decade of work in international conflict resolution. He is a past chair of the Management Committee of the Environmental Grantmakers Association and a founding member of the Peace and Security Funders Group.

Mr. Toben serves on several nonprofit boards of directors and advisory councils, including the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation in New York, Legacy Works in Palo Alto, and the Great Valley Center in Modesto. He is a former member of the Portola Valley Planning Commission and was elected to the Portola Valley Town Council in November 2003. In 2005, Mr. Toben was elected as Mayor of Portola Valley and will begin his term in 2006. Mr. Toben is a graduate of the Yale Law School and the University of North Carolina, where he was a Morehead Scholar. His wife Janice is the Coordinator for Social and Emotional Learning at the Nueva School in Hillsborough. He has two sons, ages 19 and 15.

Bob Uyeki
Executive Director

Bob Uyeki was appointed the Executive Director of the Y & H Soda Foundation in 2007. With 20 years of experience working in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors in the Bay Area, Bob has previously served as Senior Program Officer at the Y & H Soda Foundation, Program Officer at the East Bay Community Foundation, Program Coordinator at The San Francisco Foundation, and Director of the San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival.

He has served on the Boards of Directors of the East Bay Community Foundation, the Foundation Consortium for California's Children and Youth, the Family Independence Initiative, and the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. Bob has also served as Chair of Northern California Grantmakers' Emergency Loan Fund and Co-Chair of the Northern California Chapter of Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy. He holds a Masters in Public Administration, with an emphasis in strategic planning and management of public and nonprofit organizations, from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a B.A. in English from Amherst College.

Sylvia Yee
Board Member

Sylvia Yee, vice president of programs at the Haas, Jr. Fund, oversees the Fund’s grantmaking and development of program strategy. Her work at the Fund is driven by a long-standing commitment to serving children, families, and communities, and it is deeply linked to her many community and nonprofit leadership roles.

In the course of her work at the Fund, Sylvia has helped spark several major local initiatives. For example, she played a lead role in establishing the San Francisco Beacon Initiative, a public-private collaboration to turn schools into community centers for youth development. A founding board member of the Oakland-based Team-Up for Youth, she led the early development of this organization that aims to level the playing field in sports opportunities for girls and low-income youth.

Sylvia has also served as board chair—and, in many cases, co-founder—of numerous national, state, and local organizations, including Asian Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, the Foundation Consortium, Family Support America, and the Bernal Heights Community Foundation.

Before joining the Fund, Sylvia was a program executive in education and health at the San Francisco Foundation. Having begun her career as a high school teacher, she taught and administered programs for more than a decade at the elementary, secondary, and university levels, both in the U.S. and in the People’s Republic of China. She also directed a community-based nonprofit agency providing educational services to immigrant and low-income youth in San Francisco's Mission District.

Sylvia earned her Ph.D. in Educational Administration and Policy from Stanford University, her Masters in Teaching at Reed College and a B.A. in History at Stanford University. Her publications include “Careers in the Classroom,” published by Teachers College Press, and “Got Me a Story to Tell: Five Children Tell About Their Lives,” which she co-authored.