North Star Fund is currently hiring for a Social Media and Development Manager to lead North Star's online and social media strategies and manage our development systems.

This position is an opportunity to develop an exciting new program at an established community foundation and organize philanthropic activists in support of grassroots-led social change in New York City.The Social Media and Development Manager will create new tools for North Star stakeholders around online activism and giving, create fresh, relevant content for our website and other platforms, and raise money through email campaigns and sales of e-journal ads. The Social Media and Development Manager will also set up, manage and monitor the database for maximum efficiency and ensure data accuracy.

This position is perfect for a self-starter with a couple years of fundraising under their belt and lots of experience with online activism. We're looking for someone who is a creative leader and a "systems" person who enjoys working with data and is good at it.

If you're committed to North Star's mission and think you have the right stuff, please download the job description for more information about how to apply. No phone calls please.

North Star Fund is currently hiring for a Communications Director to lead North Star's communications and messaging strategy. The ideal candidate will be a creative leader with a proven track record in strategic communications for progressive causes. He or she will be an effective project manager who is committed to getting results in a fast-paced environment. This position is an opportunity to raise the profile of an established community foundation and organize philanthropic activists to support grassroots-led social change in New York City.

The Communications Director leads our communications and messaging work, produces compelling content, and will lead a website redesign process in the first six months. We're looking for someone who can take our communications work to the next level, and who has exceptional writing and editing skills, good visual design sense and excellent attention to detail.

If you're committed to North Star's mission and think you have the right stuff, please download the job description for more information about how to apply. No phone calls please.

We will be honoring Kai with the North Star Award next Tuesday, May 8 at our annual Community Gala. In Kai's words, "I'm humbled to be among the people that the North Star Fund is honoring at its Community Gala on May 8. I'd be delighted if the Colorlines.com community would join me, either by attending the event or supporting the work with a donation."

Marjorie Fine recalls trick-or-treating for UNICEF as her first conscious activism. "I realized there were children in trouble someplace, and if we collected money, something good could happen from it." Social justice values were strong in her family, along with a Judaism steeped in the Talmud's instruction that 'One is not expected to finish the task; neither is one permited to put it down.' "We were called to pay attention, to give back," Margie says.

As a high school activist, Margie organized a shut down of her school to protest the Vietnam War. In college, when abortion was illegal in most of the U.S. but newly legal in New York State, she started a pregnancy counseling center to make sure women had the information they needed. After college, she was the first director of the Reproductive Rights National Network, and was active in the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA), an early North Star Fund grantee. She was also a volunteer hotline counselor for New York Women Against Rape, a past North Star Fund Frederick Douglass Award recipient.

Margie joined North Star's Community Funding Board in the mid 1980s, bringing her commitment to connecting feminism with economic justice and class issues. "I learned so much, being among smart and passionate people really engaged in social justice. It turned on a light: I could do this for my livelihood." Margie became North Star's first development director in 1987, then served as its executive director from 1988 to 1993, leading and shaping North Star's activist-led grantmaking and progressive donor programming. "I'm really proud to have been part of developing North Star workshops to help people of wealth move into the right relationship with their money, use it for living well and also living out their values."

As executive director at the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program from 1993 to 2005, Margie directed the funding of social justice organizing groups nationally. Margie then began working with the Center for Community Change, looking at fundraising as a way for grassroots organizations to maximize community and individual resources, commitment and involvement. This has been the focus of her writing and workshops over the past six years. Now director of The Linchpin Campaign, Margie works to expand resources available to community organizing. She believes fundraisers are the unsung heroes of social change.

Central to Margie's activism and life is her Judaism and her affiliation with Kolot Chayeinu, a Brooklyn independent synagogue rooted in social justice. Equally fundamental are her experiences and friendships in Morocco, gained through regular visits starting in 1997. "My time with friends there, who have become family, has colored what Islam means to me, in the way people practice it, and in their own reaching out to social justice."

"My work finds me standing in the midst of people all over the world doing activism and social justice, in the spot where money and organizing and love get together and move things forward."

On January 23, 2012, Toby D'Oench, one of North Star's cherished founders, passed away following a long illness. His wide circle of friends, colleagues, and loved ones remembered him at a memorial service at Chelsea Piers, where his children played hockey for years, close to his beloved Hudson River.

North Star Fund is dedicating our May 8, 2012 Community Gala to Toby's memory and his legacy. We asked some of his friends and colleagues from North Star Fund to contribute memories of Toby. Following are their moving and inspiring accounts.

Katherine Acey: A Legacy of Love, Loyalty, and Joy

Marsha Bonner: A Passion for Change

Anne Hess: Keeping the Vision

Hugh Hogan: My Guide

June Makela: An Activist, Organizer, and Leader

Michael Ratner: Looking to the Future

John Silva: Toby Had a Plan

In 1979, a young group of donors sat around the table and made North Star. They believed that the existing models for making their city fairer and more just were too limited. They believed that creating social change in a city increasingly characterized by profound inequality would require organizing in two constituencies: among the communities struggling for economic security, yes, but, as importantly, among the city's wealthy. It would take the organizing of donors, one by one, to generate the resources to invest in the real grassroots work that, at the time, larger foundations simply wouldn't touch. At North Star, philanthropic organizing and community organizing would go hand in hand.

Fast forward 33 years. Six young people came together realizing that they too wanted more options for making a difference in the neighborhoods of New York City. Activists with resources beyond their immediate needs--Chris, Ellie, Julia, Nickerson, Michelle and Katherine--wanted to do more than just cut a check to the first organization in their inbox. They wanted to leverage their dollars to generate even more resources to support membership-led community organizing, while learning first-hand about how this work is done. Their vision: a giving circle. They approached North Star to house this effort.

According to Hugh Hogan, North Star Executive Director, "I've been trying to create just these conditions where people come to us and say, 'We want to get out of the isolation that comes with privilege. We want to work with people from all over New York and make an investment in improving our communities.'" These young leaders who had come to North Star's door were the next generation of donor activists. They were operating in the spirit of the founding of North Star. The partnership between North Star and REVIVE was born.

The Idea for REVIVE

The founding members of REVIVE came to know one another through their participation in Resource Generation (RG). Julia Read describes "RG," as it is known, as a place where "young people with wealth are given the support they need to figure out how to leverage their privilege and money in pursuit of a larger vision of social change." At RG's annual conference, Making Money Make Change, participants come together to explore how they can become more conscious philanthropists. Some leave wanting to take action to put these lessons into place. Including Chris Heavener:

"We found each other through an action meeting that took place right after that conference," recounted Chris. "People from RG came together at my apartment. We talked about the different roads we could take to put what we had learned into practice. We had eight months to talk about what we were interested in, where we wanted to take it, but there was so much we didn't know."

Here is what they did know: They wanted to work across class, learning from people affected by injustice and inequality first-hand. They wanted to support community organizing, with a real emphasis on organizations that were member-led. They wanted to support organizations that were promising but small, and where their dollars would make a real difference. And, they didn't want to do this alone. Being with others would force them to challenge themselves. As REVIVE member Nickerson Hill puts it, "I'd been struggling to figure out how to be organized about my giving. I was looking for a way to really push myself. I wanted an opportunity to be with other people who were also trying to give gifts in a smarter and bigger way."

Ultimately, six RG constituents decided to form a giving circle, where they would each make a large gift, raise money from others, and make collective choices about how to move this money towards groups doing grassroots organizing in the communities of New York City. They needed an experienced institution that could help guide them. Enter North Star.

The Giving Circle Finds a Home

The REVIVE members approached North Star because they wanted to learn how to do social justice philanthropy from an institution that shared their same values. Once North Star came on board, staff came up with a creative way to partner with REVIVE without creating an entirely new apparatus. Revive ended up partnering with the North Star Community Funding Committee (CFC). The CFC consists of 12 members, the majority of whom are community organizers themselves. It is the CFC that goes out to the neighborhoods of New York City to visit organizations doing the most effective work, asks them the tough questions drawing from their own experiences, and then determines which groups North Star should fund.

REVIVE members would shadow the CFC, learning the ropes while on site visits to organizations applying for funding from North Star. Then REVIVE would give half the money they raised as grants through the CFC. The other half they would select after their site visits with CFC members. In between site visits, North Star would lead workshops and trainings for the REVIVE members to deepen their thinking about power and privilege and connect these lessons to grantmaking. The ultimate goal: REVIVE members would learn as much as they could about philanthropy, and raise $80,000 for the organizations of their choice.

Partnering with North Star gave the REVIVE members confidence as they were embarking upon this new venture. "I knew that the organizations we ended up giving to would be those organizations that I want to support, the organizations led by the people they are serving," said Nickerson. Of course, there wasn't too much time to bask in this confidence. As Chris puts it, the process was a "whirlwind." Everyone went from shaking hands on a partnership in October to, three weeks later, holding their first orientation meetings. Soon thereafter, they were out in the field doing site visits, each REVIVE member being paired with two members from the Community Funding Committee.

Out in the Field

"I was really nervous on my first visit," admitted Chris. "Thankfully, I was paired up with really knowledgeable people: Henry Serrano (Senior Organizer, Community Voices Heard) and Walter Barrientos (Program Officer, North Star Fund)."

The experience of going out there on site visits was similarly powerful for the other members of REVIVE. Nickerson reflected on a visit to Cabrini Immigrant Services on the Lower East side:

North Star Fund emphasizes that, in the visits, we should be seeing the members of the organization participating--not just the staff. No community organizing without community empowerment. But, I still was so moved to actually see this for myself. Half of the people at the meeting representing Cabrini were participants in the organization; a lot of them were non-English speakers. Some organizations would shy away from having someone who didn't speak English on a site visit, but that would be a mistake. Even if we didn't speak the same language, I could feel their passion for the work of Cabrini.

The site visits took them to all corners of the city to learn about the work of North Star applicants. Julia was visiting with migrant workers from the Philippines at DAMAYAN learning about how they organize domestic workers, and Chris was visiting VAMOS Unidos, which organizes street vendors. Chris also visited Black Women's Blueprint, which works to stop violence perpetrated by the police against Black women.

Finally, with the site visits over, REVIVE members headed back to the conference table to decide on the final list of organizations they would support.

Impact

But first, how much would they have to give? They had set an ambitious goal of raising $80,000. Much to their pleasant surprise, between their own gifts and outreach to their networks, REVIVE members had raised almost $110,000. They had surpassed even their highest expectations. So in addition to the personal experience of learning about social justice philanthropy, they would also make an even greater difference in the budgets of the groups they selected to fund.

For North Star, the impact was two-fold. First, thanks to the hard work of REVIVE members, grantees now had additional resources to do their organizing. But, as importantly, REVIVE helped put into focus North Star's original mission. As Hugh puts it, "Our founder, Toby D'Oench, said that fundamentally we were about donor organizing. REVIVE helped us get back to our roots as a donor organizer and leadership development shop."

The relationship between REVIVE and North Star is one of mutual admiration. To Roshni Melia, North Star Director of Donor Programs, it was the REVIVE members that "stepped up as leaders to make this happen. We provided them with resources, but it was really they who forged ahead."

So, what's next? Well, it doesn't seem that REVIVE members are content to sit back and celebrate their success. Not if Chris has anything to do with it: "I'm the type of personality that's never really satisfied so I want to see if we can shatter the record."

Kai Wright grew up in Indiana in a family for whom social justice was a near-evangelical cause. "We talked about issues of the day the way other people talk about sports," he says. "We didn't think in terms of careers or jobs. It was 'What are you going to do to contribute to the world?'"

In college Kai studied comparative politics in the Middle East, learning to speak Arabic and following a path to academia. But as he graduated from college and came out as gay, he gravitated to Washington D.C. and was soon working for the Washington Blade, a gay community newspaper. "I was there because I wanted to report for my community. I discounted the idea of dispassionate, third-party 'voice of God' journalism. This experience informed everything I've done since."

In the 1990s, even as antiretrovirals became available and death rates in some communities were dropping, Kai saw that the AIDS epidemic among Black people was very much on the rise. This became a central subject of his writing. "I knew people who were dying and I felt like it was important to report on their behalf, to amplify their voices as much as possible." When few others were even aware of the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic unfolding in South Africa and Zimbawe at the end of the 20th century, Kai was there, eyes open, reporting what he saw, telling some of the most difficult stories imaginable.

Similarly, in middle of the last decade as the economy seemed to be booming, Kai looked around. "Everywhere I looked I saw people in my community in economic trouble, deep in predatory credit. It was as if there were literally two different universes." He has closely reported the impact of the unfolding economic crisis on African Americans. Now, as an investigative reporting fellow of the Nation Institute, Kai will be doing ambitious reporting to substantiate the ways in which there was an intentional creation of economic ruin among people with few resources, for the purpose of profit in the financial sector.

Kai is also editorial director of Colorlines.com, a contributor to The Nation magazine, and a regular commentator on National Public Radio and other broadcast media on poverty, racial justice and sexual politics, among other topics. He is an author, most recently, of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York. At ColorLines, Kai says, "We're working to create a space where people who are affected by the problems covered are seen as the experts on them. Our most legitimate sources are people in the community who are experiencing the things we're writing about."

"So many of the people I've used as sources to understand the world I'm writing about have been grantees of the North Star Fund. North Star's perspective on the role of grassroots leadership in social change is both a great fit for what ColorLines does, and also a great fit for my own perspective as a journalist and how I try to go about my career."

One of Benjamin Warnke's earliest memories is being at civil rights marches in Washington with his mother and siblings. His father, a Washington lawyer who held senior positions in the Johnson and Carter administrations, was a leading voice against the Vietnam War from within the Pentagon. "We were encouraged to be engaged in the politics of the time," he said. "It just seems natural that I would continue to do that, and take my daughters to those kinds of events. I hope my daughters will be doing the same with their children."

Today, Benjamin Warnke is founder and principal of Alembic Community Development. In low-income communities across the Bronx, northern Manhattan, and Brooklyn, Alembic works with government, corporate, private, and nonprofit partners to develop affordable housing for low-income families and people with special needs. Among his other volunteer activities, Benjamin serves on the Board of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization dedicated to peace, social justice and humanitarian service.

Alembic recently completed a 106-unit building in the Bronx, in partnership with Community Access, providing housing for homeless people with chronic mental illness, as well as for low income individuals and families. In cooperation with Community League of the Heights, a previous North Star Fund grantee, Alembic is rehabilitating a 73-unit apartment building for low income families in Inwood, and constructing a new 44-unit building for low income residents and formerly homeless people with chronic mental illness in Washington Heights, with an additional component for youth aging out of foster care. Currently under construction is a 46-unit building for women coming out of the criminal justice system, in cooperation with Providence House in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Many other projects are in the works.

"When an organization wants to work with us," Benjamin said, "we encourage them to think as big as possible. This work can seem nearly impossible and to take forever, so a plan ought to be something that truly advances their mission, that they're excited about." Alembic works with its partners to identify appropriate development sites, to structure financing and to put together strong development and design teams. "We work very closely with organizations through all stages of the development process."

"Typically, smaller nonprofits are required to partner with larger for-profits or nonprofits, and often the smaller nonprofit loses control of the process and too much of the economic benefit," Benjamin said. "Our role is to ensure that that doesn't happen. We help them develop their vision, build their real estate development capacity, and become financially stronger as a result of their partnership with us."

In Benjamin's view, the work and values of North Star dovetail with those of Alembic. "North Star's expertise is in identifying grassroots organizations that are able to take best advantage of the scarce resources that are out there. North Star funds organizations to get to the next level, and that's where we can help, with development or a more sustained kind of strategic planning. It's a collective effort-- and I'm encouraged and inspired by the work that we're all doing."

Benjamin Warnke will be honored with a North Star Award at the 2012 Community Gala for his work fostering cooperation among government, corporate, private, and nonprofit partners to develop affordable housing for low-income families and people with special needs across the Bronx, East Harlem, and Brooklyn. Click here to find out how to support the 2012 Community Gala.

Picture the Homeless (PTH) operates on the principle that in order to end homelessness, people who are homeless must become an organized, effective voice for systemic change. Anthony Williams and Lewis Haggins, Jr., were both homeless when they founded PTH in the fall of 1999. They were catalyzed by the Giuliani administration's policy of criminalizing homeless people.

Their name, Picture the Homeless, invites you to think about who is homeless in this society and why they're homeless. Because to eradicate homelessness, we need to know the facts and discard stereotypes. We need to get the whole story, and to integrally involve homeless people in the discussion. And to do that, Picture the Homeless says, "Don't talk about us, talk with us."

According to Jean Rice, a founding member of PTH's board of directors, "Nationwide, the fastest rising homeless demographic is single moms and children." In New York City, 10,000 homeless families--with 17,000 homeless children--sleep every night in our city's shelter system.

With less and less affordable housing, the working poor are another fast rising element. "I live in a shelter," says PTH member Kendall Jackman, "and most of the women I live with are home health aides, or security guards, or they work in retail. They just can't afford an apartment in the city."

Lynn Lewis, the executive director of PTH remarks that, "Homeless people are a lens through which to see poor folks in general in the city. We're not going to eradicate homelessness until we address the causes--extreme poverty, racism, and gender discrimination, and all the ways our economy privileges some people over others."

Lynn Lewis was at the first formal meeting on January 20, 2000 at CHARAS/El Bohio Cultural and Community Center. Less than a year-and-one-half later, and while it was still very tiny, PTH received its first foundation grant to organize homeless New Yorkers.

"North Star was our first funder," says Lynn. "We applied because North Star supports organizing, and specifically organizations that are testing new ideas or new approaches. With the $5,000 we got from North Star, one of the first things we did was buy the fax/phone/copier that we still use today!"

Civil Rights

At the time of its founding--and to this day--homeless people are a frequent target for selective enforcement of "disorderly conduct" charges, a vague catch-all charge used by the police to make arbitrary arrests. PTH began with a campaign to eliminate the charge and emerged as a leader and a resource in the current campaign to end the practice of biased based policing, Communities United for Police Reform. Among the issues on this campaigns agenda are all forms of biased based policing, including "stop and frisk," a practice that profiles people of color, especially Black and Latino youth.

Says Lynn Lewis, "We have a long history of fighting selective enforcement. We are proud that we bring that experience to the table and that, finally, housing status is included in the range of communities that police reform groups recognize as targeted."

Bringing Housing out of the Warehouse

In 2006, angered by vacant buildings and apartments withheld from the market through speculation, PTH collaborated with the office of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer to undertake a count of vacant buildings in Manhattan. They found that the total number of vacant apartments in Manhattan alone exceeded the number of people living on the streets or in shelters. PTH worked with Melissa Marks-Vivierto and other City Council allies to craft Intro 48, legislation that would compel the city to do an annual survey of vacant buildings and land. (That legislation has since been stalled in committee by the housing committee chair.) In 2011, PTH partnered with Hunter College and undertook a bigger, citywide survey. Three hundred volunteers spent 1,500 hours walking the streets of all five boroughs to count vacant buildings. After covering just a third of the city, PTH found enough space to potentially house 200,000 people.

Because of PTH's effectiveness in changing the conversation about homelessness, North Star Fund recently awarded PTH a Movement Leadership grant. The grant will enable PTH to develop a campaign with a clear policy mandate to turn warehoused properties into affordable housing. Along with $50,000 of general operating support, this grant includes intensive training with four other proven organizations. According to Lynn, "North Star has helped nurture relationships between different organizing groups in different sectors. Through the Movement Leadership program, we're working alongside groups that might not meet otherwise --and we're learning a tremendous amount from each other."

Picture the Homeless will be awarded the North Star Frederick Douglass Award at the 2012 Community Gala on May 8. The award recognizes their work developing leadership among members of the homeless community and empowering homeless people to impact policies and systems that affect their lives.

People knew Toby in many ways: brilliant legal colleague; exuberant hockey dad; dear friend, brother, nephew; proud father and loving spouse. Toby was also an activist and organizer who came of age in the early 1970s, after the Civil Rights movement and toward the end of the Vietnam War. While his political activism was informed by these, it was, I think, his more personal experiences that gave him a strong moral center, a deep compassion for others, and a lifelong commitment to justice and equal rights.

As a college student, he was frustrated with academia and felt a deep need to do something, to make a difference. This led him to South Africa. He was 22 when he went, not with an organized group, but by himself, hooking up with a community center near Soweto in a period of harsh political repression just before the uprising. He decided the center needed a library and found the money, books, and other volunteers to make it happen.

Once the library was firmly established, Toby returned to the US. He read an article in the New York Times about a new foundation in Boston called Haymarket, organized by young people with inherited wealth. He began to write and talk to friends about creating a similar fund in New York City. Unbeknownst to him, Martin Bunzl, an English expatriate with friends at Haymarket, had begun a similar effort. The two met and combined forces.

According to Toby, however, the fund had 26 founders, not two. He would absolutely reject the notion that he was the founder or even the co-founder. He believed you didn't do things alone. By early 1979, the fund had been named for Frederick Douglass's antislavery newspaper, The North Star. A board of community activists was in place to make grant decisions to disburse the initial $100,000 that had been raised. Under Toby's leadership, North Star made grants to AIDS activists, to community groups fighting city hospital closures and police abuse, to support custody rights for lesbian mothers -- the list goes on. Toby worked on staff at North Star Fund for seven years.

Toby also played a leadership role in the creation of the Funding Exchange, a national network of six community funds that included North Star. Today there are 16 funds in the network, thanks in part to Toby's early work.

We were a tight-knit band of 20-somethings -- heirs to wealth or not, white and black, Latino and Asian, gay and straight -- all committed to raising money for radical social change. Toby was one of the youngest of us but he was a leader, smart in a quiet way that made people listen when he spoke and embrace his ideas.

I know he was especially impressed and liked working with North Star's current staff. The fund is now 33 years old. Toby remained actively involved until his death, accompanying staff on fundraising visits for an ambitious new capital campaign, which he heartily endorsed, even as he was preparing to go into the hospital. In the years since that initial $100,000 was raised to launch North Star, the fund has grown steadily, raising a record-breaking 5.3 million dollars last year.

He leaves a great legacy.

• More Memories of Toby D'Oench

On January 23, 2012, Toby D'Oench, one of North Star's cherished founders passed away from complications related to his treatment for cancer. On Saturday, February 18, 2012, his family held a memorial service at Chelsea Piers, where his children played hockey for years, and he was remembered alongside the Hudson River that he cherished.

The story of Toby D'Oench's journey to become a co-founder of North Star Fund is epic in scope, set in many of the struggles for social justice of the time. He worked in Soweto, South Africa during the height of the Apartheid regime in the mid-1970s, to help create a school and library in the Black township. He was deeply affected by the courageous work for social change that he experienced in South Africa, and maintained a relationship to the people and the struggle for racial and economic equality for the rest of his life. Back in the U.S. in 1977, he rode a motorcycle across the continent to San Francisco, where he went to observe, and learn from, the exciting new work in social justice philanthropy being done by the Vanguard Foundation. While there, he met his future wife Tani Takagi, who was an intern at Vanguard.

The vision for a new kind of foundation sparked Toby's imagination. When he got back to New York City later in the year, Toby, Martin Bunzl, and North Star Fund's other co-founders set about to create a new kind of community foundation. Across the city in low income communities of color, the municipality sought to close essential public hospitals and schools, and withdrew essential services like police, fire department, and sanitation. Slumlords were burning buildings to collect insurance monies rather than reinvesting in critically needed housing, with residents forced to confront a resulting vicious cycle of neglect, economic and social dislocation, poverty, drugs and violence.

Toby and Martin envisioned a community foundation that would support activism in communities that the powers-that-be wanted to, in effect, erase from the map as part of a strategy of "planned shrinkage" and disinvestment. They co-authored "A Working Paper for an Alternative New York City Foundation" that was the founding document for what would become, a year later, North Star Fund. The paper outlined the core mission and structure for an innovative foundation that would support grassroots community organizing to make New York a city that worked for all its residents.

The central ideas in the paper are alive today in North Star's continuing mission to support the movement for equality, economic justice and peace. For instance, the section that outlines why the foundation would focus on community organizing says, "Through grass roots organizing, people learn to work together, discover their common interests, and develop skills needed to promote their rights. Important issues are put on the "public agenda," forcing power structures to respond." With Toby's guidance, North Star Fund made an impressive 50 grants during its first year of operation. The list of groups is an inventory of the social movement of the time -- Metropolitan Council on Housing (who we're still funding), Citywide Coalition to Save Our Hospitals, Black Veterans for Social Justice, Women Office Workers, Lesbian Mother Custody Center -- to name a few.

Toby remained at North Star Fund for seven years as its first staff person. He left to go to law school and later worked for many years at the Center for Constitutional Rights as an associate director. Since 2000, Toby rose to become a partner at the law firm Skadden Arps, where he is fondly remembered as an "extraordinary lawyer whose breadth of skills enabled him to do most anything."

In 2007, North Star Fund honored Toby D'Oench with our inaugural North Star Award. On presenting the award, Rachel Lloyd, co-founder of Girls Education and Mentoring Service said, "Toby and his colleagues looked beyond the blinders of wealth. They saw that the best way to make a better life for everyone was to support the activists on the ground. So they used their resources to get support out to the communities. To be the first to fund the fight."

Hugh Hogan, North Star Fund's Executive Director, reflects that, "Toby's vision, his self-deprecating nature, his kindness and his commitment will inspire us for a very long, long time. Personally, I have lost a mentor, and a critical but loving kitchen cabinet member who always answered my phone calls, my emails seeking advice, and our requests for support. Toby kept us grounded in the mission to organize people with wealth to direct resources to those directly affected by injustice."

Anne Hess
Progressive Philanthropist and Community Activist
North Star Fund Donor Since 1980

I wasn't living in New York when Toby co-founded the North Star Fund in 1978, but I had been very involved with the Vanguard Foundation and the Haymarket People's Fund for a number of years.

I was a willing supporter of North Star from the very beginning and admired Toby's skill and commitment to building North Star into a strong and effective community foundation. When I moved back to New York in the mid 1980's, Toby was ending his time at North Star and moving on to The Center for Constitutional Rights. Shortly after that, he began getting ready to go to law school.

The quality that I greatly admired in Toby was the fact that he never forgot about North Star. Whether he was in law school (and a father of two small children), starting out as an associate lawyer or eventually becoming a partner in major law firm in New York, Toby was always there for North Star. He was there when North Star was faced with the daunting task of finding a replacement for Betty Kappetanakis. He would often be at North Star's events and when North Star's current Executive Director, Hugh Hogan, asked people to help think through North Star's future, Toby was there.

Many people work on different things over a lifetime. Many people move on to new things and don't look back. Toby kept North Star in his line of vision until the very end. That commitment set an example for all of those around him. He was a remarkable person, who will be sorely missed.

• More Memories of Toby D'Oench

Michael Ratner
President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)
North Star Fund Donor since 1979

Toward the end of his life, Toby invited me to a meeting with Hugh Hogan and a few others at his Skadden Arp office, in a sky-high conference room overlooking much of the city. He knew he did not have a long life ahead, but the meeting was about the future. Not his future, but the future of an organization, North Star, that reflected his underlying politics: that progressive social change is rooted in grassroots activism -- a politics demonstrated by its actuality, such as the remarkable victories of Brandworkers and Domestic Workers United.

Toby never deviated from that belief, no matter the circumstances of his life -- whether he was working in a township in South Africa, or at prestigious law firm. What really moved me that day was the importance he placed on making sure that North Star's plans for a significant future campaign would be a success -- despite his illness. In almost all ways it was like any other meeting -- we gave our thoughts on the proposed ideas and asked for another go-around.

Except, it was not like any other meeting. For beneath its surface normality, we knew that there would not be many more such meetings with Toby. But Toby, being Toby, would never have even hinted that might be so. When we think about Toby we think about his warmth, his smile and his laugh; but we should never forget what he stood for and the organization that embodied his beliefs.

• More Memories of Toby D'Oench