As the Senior Manager, Communications and Partnerships, Delia partners with the Foundation’s Strategy, Partnerships and Learning team to help amplify grantees’ insights and messages that are focused on building a high-quality public education system that ensures equity and promotes thriving for all adolescents. She also supports the Foundation’s direct communications activities, and helps to support grantmaking for specific projects and capacity building opportunities. Delia enjoys the challenge associated with the Foundation’s approach to systems-change philanthropy after having worked with several direct service grantmakers, including the Meyer Foundation and the Consumer Health Foundation. Immediately prior to joining the Foundation, she was the Vice President of Programs for Metta Fund in San Francisco, where she established the grantmaking program and advanced its transparency efforts to transition from an anonymous funder by creating the fund’s website and annual reports. Her communications work has been recognized by the Council on Foundations and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
The first in her immediate family to complete high school, and then go on to college, Delia credits Head Start and teachers and advisors with whom she forged relationships and who encouraged her love of learning, and of the arts and creativity. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Art History from Bennington College, and her personal writing has been featured on National Public Radio and by the California Writers Club.
Delia is currently working on a book about the history of places where key moments in her life occurred, and loves working with neighborhood kids in her vegetable garden and watching them nurture produce from seed to sale at the roadside stand in front of her house.