Our team
From Vancouver Foundation
Vancouver Foundation works to create healthy, vibrant, equitable, and inclusive communities around British Columbia. In 2020, the foundation formed its first Purpose Team to apply a systemic change approach to itself. Here are the members of the inaugural Purpose Team:
Dara
Dara Parker (she/her) has spent her career in social purpose organizations, who are fumbling their way through systems change initiatives. She has advocated for LGBTQ rights, taught building community resilience for climate action, and experimented with distributing funding through randomized lotteries. She’s a mediocre volleyball player and spends a lot of time cuddling her French Bulldogs, Mr. Bumper and Sir Waffles.
Elisabeth
Elisabeth Geller is a 4th generation settler born on Treaty 1 territory. She is the Director, Strategic Granting at the Vancouver Foundation, focused on granting programs that support right relations, racial equity and justice, and just and sustainable futures. Elisabeth lives with her wife on the ancestral, unceded and stolen territory of the Tsawout and Tseycum peoples colonially known as Pender Island, BC, Canada.
Jeska
Jeska Slater, a Nehiyaw iskwew with roots in Treaty 5, Manitoba, leads Vancouver Foundation’s Culture and Community Team. She is passionate about systems change and enjoys painting and beadwork. Jeska is a Mother to a vivacious 9-year-old son.
Meseret
Meseret Taye (she/her) is a Black immigrant settler who lives on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. As Director-Racial Justice at Law Foundation of BC, she supports racialized groups working towards systemic change for a just society. She enjoys volunteering, gardening, traveling, and trying out new recipes.
Vince
Vince Tom (he/they) is currently the Manager of Community Learning & Engagement at the Vancouver Foundation. He is also pursuing his Masters in Community Development, where he’s researching the relationship between community knowledge and decision-making processes in CFs. Any time left is spent with his husband in their garden and stress baking.
Glenn
Glenn Ewald has dedicated his career to causes and organizations that make the world a better place. He leads government relations and stakeholder engagement at a values-based credit union, and spent 15 years driving community impact and systems change with dynamic non-profits in Toronto and Vancouver.
Rekha
Rekha Pavanantharajah is a second generation settler residing and working on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish people. As a Tamil woman along with her life experiences and education, Rekha has developed a deep passion for justice and equity, which has informed and shaped her values and work both professionally and personally.
From InWithForward
InWithForward is a social design organization co-creating new models of care & connection. In 2019, InWithForward partnered with Vancouver Foundation to bring design & social science methods to its systems change work. Here are team members who contributed to the collaboration:
Clarence
A graduate in Design and Management from Parsons School of Design, Clarence Kitt sees design as a powerful tool for conversation and a language for connection. From developing brand identities to visualizing data, the practice of processing and then translating complex ideas into a variety of visual forms that engage different audiences is the heart of Clarence’s passion.
Natalie
Natalie Napier (she/her) is Lead of Research & Storytelling, focusing on narrative as the way we transmit the values and logics of our systems. She was introduced to philanthropy tagging along as her mother canvassed door-to-door in her neighbourhood for different charities.
Nina
Nina Schmitz is a social theorist who loves to wrap her head (and hands) around big ideas. She is endlessly fascinated by the way we relate to one another, to the systems within us, and to the world around us.
Raphael
Raphael Katz is an Interaction designer who is curious about building resilient communities. He loves to collaborate with people of all walks of life to see new ideas come to life, and is fascinated by what makes people tick.
Sarah
Dr. Sarah Schulman (she/her) started and stewards InWithForward. Over the past 15 years, she’s brought community members marginalized by systems, funders, policymakers, and local leaders together to prototype & spread new social support models. She holds a doctorate in social policy from Oxford University, and loves to write, dance, and bake.
Valentina
Valentina Branada guided InWithForward's design practice from 2017-2021, and led design strategy for PurposePhil. A graduate of Parsons School of Design and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Valentina blends system and service design, design research, and a passion for co-creation. She's also a flamenco dancer!
Why PurposePhil exists
Conditions of systems change
We've learned philanthropy is far more than giving and granting: it's a complex system held together by policies, practices, resource flows, relationships, power dynamics, values, and logics. While policies, practices, and resource flows are visible to spot, values and logics tend to be hidden beneath the surface. They are revealed through the stories we tell ourselves and the societal narratives we imbibe. Stories like what we do with our money matters more than how we make our money. Narratives like philanthropy is inherently good.
Simple stories and narratives obscure a more complex reality -- like how the rise of capitalism, inequality, and institutional philanthropy are intertwined. To come to a shared understanding of our current reality and move towards philanthropic futures underpinned by equality, justice, self-determination, or [insert big idea here,] we must surface taken-for-granted stories and collectively compose new narratives.
That's where we hope PurposePhil can play a role. We developed the content to raise our own critical consciousness and open-up space to wrestle with unfamiliar ideas. Through conversations with Indigenous & faith leaders, philanthropic practitioners, community changemakers, philosophers, historians, economists, critical theorists and artists, we challenged what we thought we knew and expanded the points of possibility. We did not come to an answer. Far from it. But, we have grown our curiosity, tolerance for discomfort, capacity for dialogue, and imaginative capacities. We believe this learning orientation is necessary for us to bring a new philanthropic system into being that both values all humans equally and the beauty of human difference.
