The Bay Area Leadership Network of Color
About Us
Mission
The mission of the Bay Area Leadership Network of Color (BALNC) is to achieve a more equitable society by building a leadership pipeline for highly effective nonprofit, government and business leaders of color. We want to see more leaders of color who care about social and economic equity shaping the important decisions that affect our lives and our communities. By social and economic equity, we mean increasing opportunity and inclusion for communities that are marginalized based upon race, ethnicity or income.
What does BALNC do?
To learn more about how we help build a leadership pipeline for highly effective leaders of color, please visit our Programs and Services.
Staff
Arnold Chandler, Founding Executive Director
Arnold L. Chandler is a nonprofit leader and researcher with over 10 years of experience working to advance social and economic equity and leadership development for emerging leaders in nonprofits and government. Along with leading BALNC, Chandler works with the Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at U.C. Berkeley Law School. Recently, he worked with a Federal Monitoring team to reform the Oakland Police Department as part of a federal lawsuit settled in 2001. Prior to that he was a researcher and policy strategist at PolicyLink and authored several important policy analyses and studies in the social justice field. His areas of substantive research include: Leadership Development for people of color; Electronic advocacy and the digital empowerment of grassroots and advocacy organizations; Community policing; Infrastructure inequity in unincorporated communities in California; and Urban Inequality and Neighborhood Poverty. Chandler lives in Oakland, California with his wife Janet.
Elissa Perry, Trainer
Elissa Perry helps people and organizations with a social mission get better at what they do. For over 15 years she has worked as a staff leader, consultant and coach with several individuals, organizations and initiatives in the areas of leadership, education and the arts. Elissa also teaches in the Masters in Leadership Program at Saint Mary’s College where she facilitates diverse, cross-sector and multi-issue learning communities in developing and implementing leadership plans and practices.
From 2002 until 2008, Elissa was with the Leadership Learning Community where she worked with practitioners, funders, scholars and consultants to further the social justice field through the development, discovery, sharing and application of leadership knowledge in its many forms.
Elissa has also been involved in innovative initiatives to improve education and was a Vice President for the Different Ways of Knowing arts-infused educational model. A former high school creative writing teacher, tap dance instructor and afterschool arts program developer, Elissa is also a talented facilitator with a background in both youth and adult differentiated learning.
Jonathan Brack, Trainer
For over 10 years, Jonathan Brack as been a leader in educational equity committed to the academic and social development of underserved youth and young adults. As founding Director of the Berkeley Scholars to Cal (BSC) program, Jonathan developed a long term, academic-mentoring program for Black and Latino youth starting in the 4th grade resulting in a 93% college-going rate. He has over 8 years of classroom experience, most recently teaching Youth Development at Laney College in Oakland, CA. Jonathan also served as the Director of Workforce Development for the California School-Age Consortium (CalSAC) where he led the organization’s efforts to increase the pipeline of diverse, qualified workers into the afterschool field throughout California.
As a consultant, Jonathan focuses on the intersections between Youth Development, Education and Workforce Development. Jonathan has supported Growth Sector in the planning and implementation of California Teacher Pathway and the S.T.E.M. Institute that supports young adults from low-income communities to pursue careers in education and he currently serves as Co-Chair of the California Workforce Innovation Network (CalWIN). Jonathan has a B.A. in History and a M.A. in Education from the University of California, Berkeley. Originally from Sacramento, he now lives in Oakland with his wife Emmile and daughter Layla.
BALNC Advisory Team
Ray Colmenar
As senior program manager for Health Happens in Neighborhoods under The Endowment’s 10-year strategic program Building Healthy Communities, Colmenar is responsible for shaping and implementing The Endowment’s programmatic strategy to improve the community and neighborhood environments so that they promote health. He is also responsible for coordinating the Endowment’s statewide work on improving the health of boys and young men of color—a key cross-cutting program priority of the Building Healthy Communities strategy.
Prior to joining The Endowment, Colmenar was the associate director of PolicyLink, a national nonprofit research, communications, capacity building and advocacy organization. While there, he conducted policy research, analysis, coalition building, communications and advocacy on a range of issues, including community health. Colmenar has also served as a senior research associate with The Rockefeller Foundation, executive director for the South of Market Problem Solving Council, policy analyst for the San Francisco Department of Human Services.
He received his bachelor’s in Management Science from the University of California, San Diego; master’s in Public Policy from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
A resident of Albany, California, Colmenar lives with his wife Fatima Angeles, daughter Isabela and son Alessandro
Rea Pañares
Rea Pañares is currently a health policy and philanthropy consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, where her clients include Prevention Institute and The California Endowment. As a senior advisor with Prevention Institute, Ms. Pañares works to advance policies that promote community prevention and health equity, specifically implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including the Prevention and Public Health Fund, health care delivery reform, and disparities in care. For The California Endowment, she manages and advises a county-wide coalition on ACA implementation and opportunities.
Most recently, Rea served as Director of Minority Health Initiatives at Families USA in Washington, D.C., a national policy advocacy organization and a leading voice in the national health care reform debate. In this role, she led the organization’s efforts to strengthen health policies and proposals with an eye toward improving racial and ethnic minorities’ access to quality, affordable health care; developed tools and resources to build institutional capacity within communities of color; and raised awareness about minority health policy issues among key stakeholders, including members of the media and elected officials.
Prior to this position, she was a program associate at Grantmakers In Health (GIH), where she was responsible for leading GIH’s work in the areas of racial and ethnic health disparities, including language access, immigrant health, and the social determinants of health. She was also involved with projects related to foundation support for public policy and advocacy, public health, and environmental health. She has held positions at the National Business Group on Health and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Ms. Pañares holds a master’s degree in health policy and management from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley in molecular and cellular biology. She is currently the Chair of the board of directors of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum.
Rachel Paras
Rachel Paredes Paras joined Alameda County Public Health in October 2011. Within a year, she became program manager for the Food to Families initiative working to 1) increase availability of healthy fresh food, 2) to increase local economic and employment opportunities for young adult residents, and 3) to enhance perinatal clinical services connecting women to the improved food environment in West Oakland and the Ashland Cherryland area. Additionally, she supports program and policy efforts towards sustainable nutrition education and physical activity practices.
Rachel has over fifteen years of experience in the nonprofit sector with emphasis in youth programming and development. She was also the youth services director for a community action program with a focus on vulnerable young people in southern Alameda County, She served as the executive director o Oasis For Girls (a grassroots youth leadership program for young women of color in San Francisco) where in 2010, she was honored by Supervisor Chris Daly and the SF Commission on the Status of Women during women’s history month.
Rachel is committed to working in and with dynamic, values-based, mission-driven environments promoting successful community and collaborative leadership, learning, and social change. She has lived in the Bay Area since 1989, with the exception of a two-year hiatus where she worked with community based programs through Brown University’s Swearer Center for Public Service in Providence, Rhode Island. Rachel has a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and holds a Master in Public Administration from the University of Southern California. She is the proud partner of her graphic designer husband and the parent of an active elementary school aged daughter and an extremely talkative toddler son. You can find her virtually in FB and LinkedIn, but to really get to know her prefers old-fashioned face-to-face time.
Robert Phillips
Robert Phillips is the Director of Health Programs at the Sierra Health Foundation. In this role, he leads a newly established Health Unit and oversees its development and implementation. The Health Unit’s current programs include the Healthy Sacramento Coalition, the Respite Partnership Collaborative and the Sacramento Region Health Care Partnership.
Robert is also a Senior Fellow with the Movement Strategy Center, where he is working to design a structure, vehicle, and venue that explicitly focus on the racial, economic, geographic, generational, and gender dimensions of equity as a way to achieve health.
Robert was formerly a Senior Fellow, Director, and Senior Program officer at The California Endowment. For 6 years, Robert Phillips led the foundation’s efforts around health care reform, health advocacy and efforts to improve the health of California’s young males of color. In his various capacities at TCE, Phillips served as the foundation lead many major funding initiatives such as the foundation’s Health Care Reform campaign, the Community Clinics Initiative (CCI), Covering California’s Kids (CCK) program, and the Boys and Men of Color (BMoC) program. Over the course of his tenure at The Endowment, Robert was either personally responsible for, or directly oversaw more than $150 million in grants to communities and organizations across California and the nation.
Prior to joining The Endowment, Phillips was a Principal at Carter Phillips LLC, a public affairs firm that specialized in strategic communications and political strategy. He was a senior associate at PolicyLink. Robert also served as a political director, a capital strategies coordinator and organizer for the Service Employees International Union, and a senior health policy analyst for the AFL-CIO in Washington, DC.
He is board chair of Social Interest Solutions, a nonprofit organization dedicated to leveraging technology innovation to enables individuals and families to enroll in eligible public and private health and social services, a member of the board of Voices for America’s Children—the nation’s largest network of multi-issue child advocacy organizations, and a member of the Board of Community Catalyst, a national non-profit advocacy organization working to build consumer and community leadership focus on transforming the American health system. Previously, Robert was president of the board of Health Access California Foundation, Secretary/Treasurer of the Board of Trustees of the Alameda County Medical Center, and a member of the board of the California Transplant Donor Network, and was former.
Robert received his BA from Morehouse College in Atlanta, his MPA from the Maxwell School of Citizen and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and his MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Tia Martinez
Tia Martinez is an independent consultant who was previously the chief equity officer at the Stupski Foundation. Tia came to the foundation from the Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at UC Berkeley Law School, where she was acting director of education, leading a policy unit that produced research, policy prescriptions and curricular innovation on issues related to education reform and racial justice. Prior to joining the Warren Institute, she served as strategic consultant to the Office for Civil Rights in the US Department of Education. In this capacity, she led a strategic planning process and supported nationwide rollout and implementation of the new strategy across 12 regional offices. Tia was also a manager at the Bridgespan Group, where she worked with a range of clients including the nation’s largest constituency-based Hispanic civil rights organization and an urban school district reform intermediary. As a senior fellow at the Hewlett Foundation, Tia worked on issues related to disadvantaged adolescents and immigrant families. She has also worked as a policy analyst for the Corporation for Supportive Housing and the San Francisco Mayor’s HIV Health Services Planning Council. Tia has an AB in History from Harvard University, a Master in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy, and a JD from Stanford Law School