Staff Update: Director of Learning

Alan Kwok will be leaving his role as Director of Learning at San Diego Grantmakers and assuming the position of Director, Disaster Resilience at Northern California Grantmakers beginning November 1, 2018.

We have been fortunate to have Alan on our team this year — he has contributed so much to the quality and thoughtfulness of our program offerings and our development as a more equitable organization. He took a deep dive into the field of philanthropy and the community needs in San Diego, applied his significant program design skills thoughtfully and effectively and did an extraordinary job leading our first summit on advancing gender equity.  Plus, he was fun to have as part of the SDG team! He will be sorely missed.

Alan has extraordinarily deep experience in disaster resilience as a practitioner and a researcher. That, coupled with his familiarity with the work of regional associations of grantmakers, makes him perfectly suited to advance the four key priorities of his new role: growing the number of funders engaged in funding disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery activities; providing advice and technical assistance to funders; building an infrastructure to facilitate information dissemination between community partners and funders; and providing oversight for business continuity planning for NCG itself, and eventually, our Philanthropy CA alliance.

Alan has worked closely with SDG staff to ensure a smooth transition of our program offerings for the rest of 2018 and into early 2019 – including the May 15, 2019 annual conference (save the date!). He is also contributing to our current work of drafting SDG’s 2019 goals, work plan and budget. Alan will continue to reside in San Diego, so we are looking forward to staying connected to him, especially as he will still be part of the Philanthropy CA team!