People
Diana Chavez
May 23, 2012
Born in the Bay Area, Diana has served as a social justice advocate for over 7 years. She began working in community organizing as an AmeriCorps member working with youth in low-income neighborhoods of Boston. Back in San Francisco, she became a social justice grantmaker and project manager at Tides, a nonprofit that provides infrastructure and grantmaking services to more than 200 social justice organizations and more than 400 philanthropists and institutions across the globe. Diana recently returned from a year in Nicaragua advocating for women’s reproductive rights while partnering with Central American Women’s Fund (Fondo Centroamericano de Mujeres), and is very excited to join the Board of Third Wave to continue this focus at home. She brings a desire to strengthen underserved communities and to support the fields of health and justice for women and girls.
Posted in: Current Board, People
Dipty Jain
July 22, 2010
Dipty Jain, JD, Senior Consultant at FMA, assists FMA’s clients with developing an appropriate fiscal infrastructure and implementing effective fiscal policies and procedures and internal financial controls.
Her legal experience coupled with her background in auditing and internal controls work gives her a comprehensive perspective when providing finance and operations guidance to not-for-profit organizations.
After graduating from The College of New Jersey with a B.S. in Accounting, Dipty worked as a public accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. She also spent over four years performing domestic and international internal controls audits at Schering-Plough Corporation and Bristol-Myers Squibb Company.
She holds a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School, where she was a Sparer Public Interest Law Fellow, and worked as a legal intern with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development and Domestic Violence Projects.
Dipty volunteers with Queens based Andolan, Organizing South Asian Workers, serves on the Board of Directors of the New Jersey-based nonprofit Manavi, and is Chair of the Finance Committee of the Third Wave Foundation.
Posted in: Former Board
Jennifer Van Dam
October 23, 2012
External Relations Intern
Jenn is excited to join the Third Wave Foundation as the External Relations Intern because of her interest in issues of race and gender. She has also worked as Membership Co-chair for Women In Film and Media Pittsburgh and as a Development and Membership intern with WQED. She received a BA in Communications and Cultural Studies from Chatham University in 2012 and is currently pursuing an MA in Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement. Her interests lie specifically in the ways that stereotypes function in the media to create certain narratives that are blindly consumed and continually reproduced. She strongly advocates media literacy. Jenn looks forward to bringing her skills to Third Wave and learning many more along the way.
Posted in: People, Staff and interns
Kai Gurley
June 20, 2010
Kai Gurley is a genderqueer Georgia peach, born in Atlanta and now living in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. Kai joined the Third Wave Board of Directors in 2007, and is currently Board Chair. Following a four-year stint as Development Coordinator at the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, Kai is now an independent grantwriting consultant for several reproductive justice organizations all over the U.S. Kai is also an aspiring farmer, and has recently interned on organic farms in rural North Carolina. Kai is especially fond of cows, planning for parenting, and v-neck sweaters. Kai graduated Summa Cum Laude from Florida State University in 2001 with a BS in Interdisciplinary Social Science, focusing primarily on Sociology and Political Science.
Posted in: Former Board
Kim Ford
October 23, 2012
External Relations Manager
Kim Ford is excited to join Third Wave as External Relations Manager. Along with her belief that everyone is a philanthropist, she brings extensive experience working with community-based and national nonprofit organizations. She has served as Board Chair of the Audre Lorde Project, a panel member of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice U.S. Grants, and recently founded Kitchen Table Giving Circle: A Black/African Descent Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Women Philanthropic Initiative.
Kim has worked with Stonewall Community Foundation on their Racial Equity Initiative and with Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues as Operations Manager. Previously she served on the board of African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change as board member, board chair and first salaried Executive Director, and as the Development Officer/Event Manager at Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice.
Kim's experience with grassroots organizations includes: NYC’s annual LGBTST Kwanzaa celebration; NYC’s first Black Pride; Arms Akimbo: NYC's first-ever Lesbian, Bisexual, Two-Spirit and Transgender Women of Color Organizing Institute; NYC’s People of Color Pride Weekends; as well as working in coalition with Las Buenas Amigas and The Lesbian Avengers. She has facilitated workshops; moderated and spoken at various events, panels and readings; and presented on various topics including organizing in the LGBTST POC communities, racism within LGBTST communities, women’s health and wellness, and sexuality.
Posted in: People, Staff and interns
Mia Kim Sullivan
August 4, 2010
Co-chair and Secretary
Mia Sullivan is the Director of the Civil Liberties and Public Policy program at Hampshire College, a national project dedicated to educating, training and inspiring new generations of reproductive justice advocates, leaders and supporters. Combining education, activism, leadership training and organizational support, CLPP promotes an inclusive agenda that advances reproductive and sexual health and rights nationally and internationally.
Mia oversees CLPP programming, develops community and internal movement relationships, and works to strengthen program infrastructure, sustainability, and participant and issue diversity. Before joining CLPP, Mia was a civil rights and anti-poverty lawyer and worked on a wide range of housing, family law, public benefits and consumer cases, engaging in impact litigation, legislative and administrative advocacy, and community organizing. Mia is a graduate of New York University School of Law.
Posted in: Current Board, People
Rebecca Walker
June 20, 2010
Time Magazine named Rebecca Walker one of the fifty most influential American leaders under forty - an award which has been followed by many others, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from the League of Women Voters and an Honorary Doctorate from the North Carolina School of the Arts.
Rebecca is the author of To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, in print for more than ten years and taught in Gender Studies programs around the world; the bestselling memoir Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association; and What Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine The Future, about which Booklist wrote: “Walker has done society at large a great service by bringing forth these voices, these views.” Rebecca’s new memoir, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, was published in March 2007.
As a speaker and lecturer, Rebecca has presented at hundreds of high schools and universities including Exeter, Head Royce, Harvard, Oberlin, Smith, MIT, and Stanford, and addressed dozens of organizations and corporations including the National Council of Teachers of English, the Walker Art Center, RuterDam Stockholm, Hewitt Associates, and the Ministries of Culture and Gender of Estonia, at the first-ever Conference on Masculinity in the Baltics.
She has been a consultant on generational differences, diversity, and the role of gender in the workplace for Sony Music, Microsoft and JP Morgan Chase. She has been featured on Charlie Rose, Good Morning America, and Oprah.
Rebecca teaches the art of memoir at workshops, MFA programs, and writing conferences internationally, and offers private manuscript consultation to writers of both fiction and non-fiction. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, BookForum, The Huffington Post, Babble, Salon, Marie Claire, Glamour, Child, Plum, Essence, and Buddhadharma, and several award-winning anthologies.
After graduating from Yale in 1992, Rebecca co-founded the Third Wave Foundation. Rebecca currently sits on the boards of Children As They Are, and the environmental organization Save The Bay.
Rebecca is the daughter of Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Alice Walker and esteemed civil rights attorney Mel Leventhal. She lives in Hawaii and Northern California with her son and his father.
Posted in: Founders