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Note From Our Executive Director

Dear Thrive Community,

Happy Spring! Vaccine distribution is well underway and we want to highlight our CCAT nonprofit partners who are keeping local residents safe and informed. As we learned at our recent forum with Sequoia Healthcare District, most Californians fall along the spectrum of Cautious, Confused, or Convinced when it comes to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Our neighborhood nonprofits are partnering closely with the County of San Mateo to move our community as a whole closer to Convinced and ready.

This week, we launched a nonprofit survey as part of our Strategic Alliance Initiative in partnership with the County of San Mateo. This survey provides a nonprofit health update as a follow up to our COVID-19 nonprofit impact survey one year ago and it gauges nonprofit impact and sustainability opportunities. We are grateful to PennPAC for pro bono support in completing the first portion of our landscape analysis of our local nonprofit sector. Meanwhile, stakeholder interviews are underway to round out our analysis.

Stay tuned!

Finally, we are grateful to our speakers from the kick off for our Children & Education Peer Learning Series, where we dove into effective learning hub provider practices. We would like to invite you to our second event: Student-focused Partnerships: Strengthening Communications Among Schools, Out-of-school-time Providers and Families in the series where we will narrow our focus on the most important and central piece of this program: students. We will hear success stories from out-of-school-time providers and schools who effectively communicate with each other to support positive student outcomes.

Visit Thrive's Special Initiatives page to learn more about all our initiatives and see recordings from past events.

In Community,

Georgia D. Farooq

Stop AAPI Hate!

Thrive stands in solidarity with our AAPI community. We are sickened by the skyrocketing hate nationwide and even here in San Mateo County. Help amplify the voices against hate by reporting incidents on AAAJ’s hate tracker Stand Against Hatred. Find more ways to support the AAPI community here.

Thrive Membership

Thrive Alliance is a cross-sector membership based organization for nonprofits, government entities, foundations, businesses, and community leaders. Click here to become a member.

Thrive Resources

For Information about grant opportunities, partner events, COVID-19 nonprofit resources, membership information, and more visit Thrive's Website.

Welcome Thrive's Newest Policy & Advocacy Steering Committee Members

Miriam Yupanqui is the Executive Director of Nuestra Casa de East Palo Alto. She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley and her M.P.A. from the University of Southern California. Miriam served as a Board Member of Nuestra Casa prior to being hired as the Executive Director. Miriam also has vast experience working in our communities and program evaluation. Before Nuestra Casa, she was a Program Manager at Family Connections where she developed and implemented their Young Scholars Program.

Evan Jones is Executive Director of the Mid-Peninsula Boys & Girls Club in San Mateo County. Evan came to the club from Georgetown Law School where he worked on the Georgetown Law Journal’s Review of Criminal Procedure, as a legal intern for the honorable Robert E. Morin of the D.C. Superior Court, and as a summer legal fellow for the International Litigation practice of Earth Justice. Evan holds a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College with a minor in Government.

Thrive Highlights

Strategic Alliances Initiative

In partnership with the County of San Mateo, Thrive's Strategic Alliances Initiative aims to build capacity and strengthen nonprofits as the challenges of the pandemic impact their health. The current focus is to develop a thorough understanding of the nonprofit sector in San Mateo County. With the help of the PennPAC Bay Area team we have great quantitative analysis tools and data to provide insights into the landscape. We are also inviting all San Mateo County nonprofit leaders to complete this ~15 minute survey on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected nonprofit operations in the past year and how best to support collaboration and impact moving forward. Please assign one person from your organization to answer this survey by Wed, April 14, 2021.

Take the Survey

Civic Participation: Redistricting

Thrive continues to educate community leaders and to advocate for a transparent and equitable redistricting process. On April 15, we are hosting our state redistricting commissioner at our event District Lines and Political Power: State Level Redistricting to discuss redistricting's impact on communities, line drawing criteria, commissioner duties and most importantly how to get involved. Earlier this month we started a letter to the Board of Supervisors (BoS) asking them to implement an Independent Redistricting Commission. We urge community leaders and residents to sign on the letter before the next BoS meeting.

Children & Education Peer Learning Series

Thrive is currently supporting learning hub providers through a series of meetings focused on learning loss mitigation. On April 13, Thrive will facilitate the second session of the series to discuss Student-focused Partnerships & Strengthening Communications Among Schools, Out-of-School-Time Providers and Families. We are also frequently updating our Peer Learning Special Initiatives page with information about what the affinity group is working on, as well as links to previous meetings and other resources.

Environment & Sustainability

Congratulations to Thrive’s Environment & Sustainability leadership for recently hosting our 30th monthly meeting since 2018. Over 100 speakers and 1000 attendees have joined to address challenges and solutions in sustainable energy, food, land, transit, waste, and water through a lens of equity. Our most recent meeting included Spanish interpretation to be inclusive of the Pescadero community that is most affected by the water issues that were discussed. Read our meeting summary blog. Attend our next meeting on Earth Day - SMC Open Spaces & Natural Places: Celebrating Leadership in Advocacy, Equity, & Stewardship .

COVID-19 Community Action Teams

Thrive continues to support the COVID-19 outreach efforts of 33 nonprofit organizations who are tasked with education on COVID prevention and vaccine equity measures. We regularly convene the nonprofit partners to learn from each other about challenges and triumphs and hear updates on the latest news and outreach opportunities. Dr. Curtis Chan, SMC Deputy Health Officer, informed us about the current spread of the disease and vaccine distribution efficacy and equality. Last month, an expert joined us to discuss social media best practices and in April, local journalists will provide tools on how to use traditional media to communicate effectively.

Welcome New Thrive Members!

Individual Members: Mike Etheridge & Dawn Fitzpatrick

Nonprofit News

President Biden's American Rescue Plan Act, offers nonprofits an opportunity to utilize provisions of this new law designed to help organizations and the people they serve survive and recover. Read more here from the National Council of Nonprofits for both a summary and calls to action.

Thrive supports California Association of Nonprofits' memo in which they are urging all leaders across the state to invest in nonprofit sector through the $16 billion federal fund.

Locally, San Mateo County will be receiving over 148 million dollars, while the cities will be receiving as much as 26 million dollars. Details on the local amounts can be found in this Daily Journal Article. The federal stimulus is going to have huge implications for our community and our local economy. Alex Padilla's Office released this fact sheet explaining the allocations to California.