Hello WESTAF board of trustees: Welcome to the first biweekly of FY21. As you can guess, the biggest news of the past two weeks was learning about Chrissy Deal’s departure from WESTAF and her new role at the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation. As I mentioned in my 9/23 email to you all with this news, Chrissy has not just transformed WESTAF through her leadership during her seven years serving the organization, most recently as Director of Social Responsibility and Inclusion, she has devoted much of her career advocating for greater representation of communities of color in the nonprofit arts, culture, and philanthropy…

Hello again WESTAF trustees: Well, we’ve come to the very last biweekly of FY20. The first half of the fiscal year began promisingly enough. The second half? Well, you know. A global pandemic, an overdue reckoning with racial injustice, a gasping economy, catastrophic western climate fires and now the passing of RBG, a giant of jurisprudence, and all of the troubling implications that this represents to a democracy already dangling by a thread. Pablo Neruda said “You can cut all the flowers, but you can’t keep Spring from coming,” so let’s always let hope be our anchor while we focus…

Greetings WESTAF Trustees: Hope everyone was able to relax, take stock, and feel safe and during this past Labor Day weekend. It’s really very busy at WESTAF right now as we head towards the last few weeks of our fiscal year so let’s jump right in, shall we? JULY FINANCIALS (AH) The July financials were reviewed by the Executive Committee at their meeting on August 26 and are presented here for your review: July Cash Summary — a snapshot of cash income and expenses as of July 31st; July Financial Memo — accompanies the cash summary footnotes; Aug End of…

Greetings WESTAF Trustees: This is the first of just three more biweeklies to go until the end of this fiscal year. It’s hard to overstate the shocking whiplash we’ve experienced between the first and second halves of this year due to the sweeping, jarring impact of the pandemic. COVID is like a tidal wave, but instead of demolishing roads, trees and buildings across space, it has obliterated plans, hopes and dreams across time. Visualizing a FY21 budget in the face of such ongoing uncertainty has been quite a task, but the team rose to the challenge, and a FY21 budget…