Page One

Ron Dellums Heads Up East Bay Winners of SF Foundation Awards By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Friday September 23, 2005

Despite its name, the San Francisco Foundation showed this week that it has not forgotten the East Bay. Three of the four recipients of the foundation’s annual awards this year at Tuesday’s Herbst Theater ceremonies were either from the East Bay or were recognized for activities undertaken in the East Bay. 

• Former 9th District Congressman Ron Dellums received the Robert C. Kirkwood Award for outstanding community service and inspired leadership. 

• Retired Oakland Unity Council CEO Arabella Martinez received the San Francisco Foundation Award for her work in helping to create the vibrant Fruitvale Transit District in East Oakland.  

• Drummer and ethnomusicologist Kakarya Diouf, founder of the Oakland-based Diamano Coura West African Dance Company, received the Helen Crocker Russell Award, which is annually given to an under-recognized, mature artist making significant and ongoing contributions in the Bay Area. 

• The fourth award, the John R. May Award, went to Marin County-based Insight Prison Project for its rehabilitation work at San Quentin Prison. 

Dellums was honored for his “decades of courage, leadership, and vision in championing peace, justice, diversity, and economic equality, both locally and globally, and for his impact in moving the AIDS pandemic and its solutions to the top of the global agenda,” according to a Foundation spokesperson. 

In his acceptance address that drew a standing ovation from the Herbst Theater audience, Dellums said he was “glad to have been born in the Bay Area because activism is in our genes.” He spent much of his five minute speech on recent events in the gulf coast and Hurricane Katrina. 

“Katrina is a metaphor for what is wrong with America,” Dellums said. “There were 40 million poor people with us in America before the winds of Katrina. There are still 40 million poor people with us in America, afterwards. It would be criminal if the winds of Katrina blew the images of poor people into our living rooms and dining rooms, but then we allowed them to retreat back into the dark recesses of our minds once those winds have receded.” 

The San Francisco Foundation, founded in 1948, is a community foundation serving San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, and San Mateo counties in the areas of community health, arts and culture, neighborhood and community development, social justice, and the environment. In 2004, the foundation awarded grants totaling $64 million.