Meet the Funders REGISTRATION has been CLOSED.

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Moderator: Regina Birdsell, Executive Director, Center for Nonprofit Management

Panelists:

*Leslie Ito, Program Officer - Arts, California Community Foundation
*Sarah Murr, Community Investor - Arts & Culture, The Boeing Company
*Rick Noguchi, MFA, MBA, Senior Program Officer, The James Irvine Foundation
*Emiko Ono, Director of Grants & Professional Development, Los Angeles County Arts Commission
*Joe Smoke, Director of Grant Programs & Administration, City of Los Angeles - Department of Cultural Affairs 

Course Description
Leading funders will discuss their strategic approach to grantmaking, the types of capacity building support they provide, how to establish and maintain a relationship with a funder (even if you're not asking for money), and the best practices and common mistakes of submitting grant proposals. The discussion will be moderated by the Center's president, Regina Birdsell, and will give participants the opportunity to ask questions and get in-depth answers about giving. Be prepared with all the questions you ever wanted to ask a foundation!

Panelists Bios

Leslie Ito
Leslie A. Ito manages the foundation’s arts program area that supports individual artists and small-to-midsize arts and cultural organizations in Los Angeles County.  She brings extensive experience as a grantmaker, as well as an arts administrator and advocate. She was most recently with the Los Angeles County Arts Commission as director of grant programs. Prior to the arts commission, Ito was the executive director of Visual Communications, the nation's premiere Asian American media arts organization. In New York, Ito served as a program associate in the Ford Foundation’s media, arts and culture division.   Ito currently serves on the board of directors for Telic Arts Exchange and The Association of American Cultures (TAAC) and advisory committees for Films By Youth Inside (FYI Films) and the Watts House Project. Ito also served on the board of directors for Americans for the Arts for three years.
  
Sarah Murr
Sarah joined The Boeing Company in 1977 beginning her career in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, moving to Seattle for 18 years and settling in Southern California in 2001. While in California, her role has been to invest corporate philanthropic dollars in the arts.  For the past six years, Sarah has focused her work on arts education.  She is an active partner in the Arts for All initiative in LA County driving systemic change in LA county school districts to delivery quality, standards-based arts education to every student.   She fostered convenings between LA and Orange County counties to establish an arts education initiative in Orange County, Arts Advantage. 
Sarah is on the board of California Alliance for Arts Education, a statewide organization which advocates for access, equity and quality arts education for every student in California.

Rick Noguchi, MFA, MBA
Rick Noguchi joined the The James Irvine Foundation in 2008 as a Program Officer for the Arts and was appointed Senior Program Officer in 2010. Prior to joining the Foundation, Rick served as Program Officer in Arts and Human Development at the California Community Foundation, overseeing the design, management and implementation of the multi-issue program. He was responsible for developing the primary grantmaking strategies in the arts, aging, at-risk youth, and disability. Rick has also served in a variety of programming, fundraising and management positions with the Arizona Humanities Council, the Japanese American National Museum, the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and the UCLA Anderson School of Management. In addition, he is national award-winning writer with two collections of poetry: The Wave He Caught (Pearl Editions, 1995) and The Ocean Inside Kenji Takezo (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).

Emiko Ono
Emiko Ono has served as the Director of Grants and Professional Development for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission since 2008.  Emiko is responsible for the administration of the Organizational Grant Program, which provides $4 million in support of more than 300 arts organizations annually. She also provides direction for the Arts Internship Program and technical assistance programs for grantees, including the Arts Board Leadership Initiative (ABLI).  Prior to joining the Arts Commission, Emiko served as the Director of Grants and Professional Development for the Arts Council for Long Beach and, before that, as the Manager of Education Initiatives and Partnerships at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.  During her tenure at the Natural History Museum, she doubled the size of the volunteer program, established the museum’s first arts education program, and coauthored a report, Inspiring Wonder, Discovery, and Learning through Interdisciplinary Museum-Community Partnerships, published in 2010. Ms. Ono has served on the board of Museum Educators of Southern California and is currently serving the Emerging Arts Leaders, Los Angeles as an Advisory Board Member.

Joe Smoke

Joe Smoke attained a bachelor’s degree in Art and Archaeology with a dual emphasis on American Studies and the History of Photography from Princeton University in 1983.  He moved to Los Angeles in 1989 and finished his graduate degree at UCLA in 1991. From 1991-1995, Joe was Executive Director of the non-profit Los Angeles Center for Photographic Arts, where he organized more than 60 exhibitions and publications.
Joe became an Arts Manager for the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in 1998 and was promoted to Director of the Grants Division in 2000. In this position he supervises an annual peer-review grant process resulting in 3 million dollars of support to more than 280 LA-area artists and arts/cultural organizations.