Barbara Webster-Hawkins is Executive Director, Resource Development at the Foundation for California Community Colleges. Facilitating collaboration, accelerating innovation, and increasing resources, Webster-Hawkins directly impacts the Foundation’s mission success. A grants expert, Webster-Hawkins stimulates the Foundation’s year-over-year growth through her participatory leadership, strategic oversight, and proven skill sets in resource development. Webster-Hawkins also leads fiscal sponsorship and management services, a key component of the Foundation’s strategy to collaborate for impact by supporting the success of organizations and programs that share the Foundation’s values and priorities.
Highlights:
- Over one hundred philanthropic, corporate, state, and federal funders have contributed between $5,000 and $1.5 million per year, totaling $37 million during her tenure to date. The Foundation’s annual budget has increased from $31 million to $54 million during her tenure, a 72% increase in resources to support the California Community College system. Reflecting the quality and depth of philanthropic relationships, proposal submission success rate consistently exceeds 90%.
- Developed fiscal partnerships of mutual value with California Afterschool Network, California Acceleration Project, California Medicine, and California LAW Pathway Program.
- Works with leading philanthropies, including The James Irvine Foundation, College Futures Foundation, California Wellness Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation, JP Morgan Chase Foundation, Walter S. Johnson Foundation and others to develop projects and secure funding to improve equity in educational outcomes, provide improved student supports to reduce barriers to completion, develop guided pathways and other systems reforms to improve student success, improve student-centered design, support expansion of work-based learning, and improve underserved communities’ access to resources.
A member of the Advancement team, Webster-Hawkins closely collaborates with the Foundation’s executive team, program directors and managers, finance team, and communications experts and with the Chancellor’s Office to facilitate planning, build consensus, and guide the organization’s resource development efforts and grantmaking. Joining the organization in 2014 as its Director of Grants Development, she was named Executive Director in 2018.
Webster-Hawkins has more than 30 years’ experience in grantmaking, change initiatives, and community services for children, youth, families, and communities in California. She previously led community grantmaking in 28 Northern California counties for The California Endowment, the state’s largest health philanthropy, and then managed the awarding of hundreds of millions of dollars in bond-funded grants for children’s hospitals as Treasury Program Manager for the California Health Facilities Financing Authority. Prior, Webster-Hawkins served as the executive director for two community based organizations providing direct services to children and families and on multiple nonprofit board of directors and advisory boards. She is a volunteer advocate for increasing foster care adoptions and improving California’s child welfare and education systems, particularly for children and youth that have experienced trauma and those with disabilities.
Webster-Hawkins earned her bachelor of arts in international studies, comparative cultures from the University of the Pacific, and her master of nonprofit administration from the University of San Francisco.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbarawebsterhawkins/