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Apr 5, 2024 | 
hsfoundation.org | Jorge Cino |Madeleine Sheehan Perkins
“Since Congress failed to extend the child care stabilization funding from the American Rescue Plan Act in September 2023, the supply of child care has fallen off a cliff in many places across the United States, and its effects on families and the early childhood education workforce are being felt more than ever,” says Rebecca Gomez, Ed.D., program officer for the Foundation’s Education program at Heising-Simons Foundation.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
hsfoundation.org | Jorge Cino |Nondas Paschos
The Heising-Simons Foundation’s Education program has awarded $4 million over two years to support 11 community-based organizations working to strengthen the pipeline of diverse parent leaders in California. This marks the second round of funding for these organizations, which are part of Families Lead California, an initiative that builds parent leaders’ power to influence policy to reflect the priorities of families with children ages 0-8 in the Golden State.
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Mar 29, 2024 | 
hsfoundation.org | Jorge Cino |Madeleine Sheehan Perkins
Several grantees of the Heising-Simons Foundation have been awarded unrestricted grants in the $1-2 million range for “outstanding work advancing the voices and opportunities of individuals and families of meager or modest means, and groups who have met with discrimination and other systemic obstacles,” Yield Giving announced this week. Our grantees join a total pool of 361 community-led nonprofit recipients. Yield Giving is the philanthropic organization established by MacKenzie Scott in 2022.
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Feb 6, 2024 | 
hsfoundation.org | Jorge Cino |Madeleine Sheehan Perkins |Brian Eule
Tamir Kalifa is a freelance photojournalist based in Texas who has documented communities impacted by gun violence, the U.S.-Mexico border, civil unrest, environmental issues such as the Maui fire, and political campaigns. Over the past two years, a focus of Mr. Kalifa’s work has been capturing the aftermath of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, centering the collective mourning and mobilization of this tightly-knit community.
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Dec 8, 2023 | 
hsfoundation.org | Jorge Cino |Madeleine Sheehan Perkins
December 11, 2023, marks the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a milestone document in the history of human rights that upholds the inherent dignity, equality, and rights of every individual. Heising-Simons Foundation is pleased to partner with Article 3 to commemorate this important milestone.
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Nov 30, 2023 | 
hsfoundation.org | Jorge Cino |Nondas Paschos
“We came so very close to getting a historic entitlement for child care in this country via Build Back Better, [and] even though we did not succeed, I think it’s important to recognize that advocates and organizers have, working in coalition, fundamentally changed the conversation about child care in this country,” said Dr. Rebecca Gomez in a Q&A with grantee Child Care Aware® of America (CCAofA), an organization that works with a national network of more than 500 child care resource and...
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Nov 1, 2023 | 
hsfoundation.org | Jorge Cino |Madeleine Sheehan Perkins
As part of its grantmaking seeking to address the impact of technology on society, Heising-Simons Foundation has joined a new coalition of ten philanthropies to support public interest efforts that mitigate artificial intelligence’s (AI) harms and promote responsible use and innovation, as outlined by Vice President Kamala Harris earlier today. Other partners include the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Democracy Fund, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T.
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Oct 30, 2023 | 
hsfoundation.org | Madeleine Sheehan Perkins |Jorge Cino
Nabiha Syed leads The Markup, an award-winning media startup that challenges technology to serve the public good. Earlier this year, she was personally recognized by the NAACP as a digital civil rights icon. During the session, Ms. Syed discussed the harms of increasingly easy-to-execute cyber-attacks, a faulty algorithm that devastated the lives of 4,500 women in the Netherlands, and the environmental impacts of deploying AI technology.
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Sep 26, 2023 | 
hsfoundation.org | Jorge Cino |Nondas Paschos
A vast majority of voters believe it’s important for working parents to be able to find and afford quality child care for young children. When Congress lets $39 billion in federal child-care funds made available through the American Rescue Plan Act expire at the end of this month, the consequences for providers, educators, families, and workers will be catastrophic. In a new opinion piece published today in the Los Angeles Times, Rebecca E.
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Jun 28, 2023 | 
hsfoundation.org | Jorge Cino |Nondas Paschos
Several years ago, while still a graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab, Dr. Joy Buolamwini began to notice a troubling pattern in facial recognition technology—an inability to detect a wide range of skin tones and facial structures, even in widely available systems employed by Big Tech, government agencies, and law enforcement. The implications were concerning: “algorithmic bias” can lead to exclusion, discrimination, and criminalization of people, specifically people of color.
