Support community partnerships to increase impact!
RCF Connects (formerly the Richmond Community Foundation) is doing the crucial work of seeking out all champions of our community, including those community leaders that operate under the radar. Bendrick Foster (CEO and Founder of NewLife Movement) is the perfect example of the real-world leader we aim to learn from and support. Bendrick has spent years putting up community light fixtures, motivating kids to stay in school, ensuring safety to young girls crossing through dangerous areas, and disseminating violent arguments between young boys deep in our Richmond streets. Bendrick embodies the leader that RCF Connects aims to seek out.
When Jim Becker (President and CEO of RCF Connects) met Bendrick Foster at John F Kennedy Park in Richmond, CA a leadership spark ignited. Jim understood Bendrick’s personal dedication to being a change maker for his community and was inspired by Bendrick’s relentless determination to make his hometown a safer place-whether he had the systemic support or not. It is from this place of understanding where Jim and Bendrick realized their most valued shared principle: Equity.
From this shared value of equity, an authentic partnership between Bendrick Foster and Jim Becker has flourished and resulted in RCF Connects becoming NewLife Movement’s fiscal sponsor.
We are happy to partner with NewLife Movement.
NewLife Movement is a nonprofit in Richmond, California that provides violence prevention, education, and career training programs for high at-risk youth. Through initiatives that facilitate peer-to-peer project-based activities for criminalized Black and Brown youth, NewLife Movement leads the way in creating a safe, racially equitable space for healing and learning. Their programs create an atmosphere aimed at reducing truancy and unlearning negative behavioral patterns to relearn positive ones. In all its programs, NewLife Movement teaches communication tactics for rivaled street youth to effectively use to disseminate volatile tensions prevalent in their everyday lives.
In the spirit of fundraising collaboration, systemic culture shifting, and dismantling the scarcity mindset, please consider making a donation to our Sharing Wealth: Leadership Partner Fund. All donations will be equally split between RCF Connects and NewLife Movement for their unrestricted organizational needs. Every gift made is one more step towards mobilizing the power of connection to build a healthy thriving community for us all.
