FOUNDATION FOR TACOMA STUDENTS

The Foundation for Tacoma Students is the backbone organization to the Graduate Tacoma community-wide movement. 

Our mission is to build and strengthen Tacoma’s community-wide movement to help every child achieve success from cradle to college and career by aligning goals, data, resources, and partners.

Our Priorities

We facilitate a sense of belonging and create shared ownership by engaging Tacoma parents, youth and community (indirectly and directly), policymakers, and elected officials across multiple sectors to address equity gaps facing youth — cradle to career.

We provide a trusted source of aggregated, disaggregated, and student-level data for Graduate Tacoma Networks and community partners to best impact, influence, and improve outcomes for youth and families — cradle to career.

We serve as a key intermediary, to help align funding and community resources around strategies that positively impact youth achieving success from cradle to career.

We inform, activate, and elevate the Graduate Tacoma community movement in local, regional, and state policy to affect equitable outcomes and dismantle systems of oppression cradle to career.

We are a resource for community partners to help expand and sustain their capacity and capability to improve measurable outcomes for youth by supporting and facilitating continuous skills sharing.

Our Commitment to Equity

Equity is an approach. Equity recognizes that we do not all start from the same place because advantages and barriers exist. Equity is a process. By acknowledging these varied starting places, the Foundation seeks to correct the imbalance for the most marginalized and minoritized populations.

  • Focusing on populations furthest from meaningful opportunities.

  • Disrupting and dismantling structural and institutional racism and systems that result in oppression.

  • Aligning and directing resources to populations under-resourced.

  • Representing the community in which FFTS serves at all levels.

  • Redress past systemic and institutional practices by partnering and contracting with women-owned businesses and business owned and operated by people of color.

Our Values

Equity

Accountability

Courage

Innovation

Transparency

Collaboration

Inclusion

Optimism

Meet Our Team

Dr. Tafona Ervin

Chief Executive Officer

Gray Sterling

Deputy Director

Elvin Bucu

Senior Director of Development

MacKenzie Daniels

Finance Director

Shaima Shamdeen

Director of Communications

Ben Mitchell

Director of Advocacy & Policy

Rodney Wolfenbarger

Director of Pierce County Pathways

Alan Foote

Data Analyst

Justin Sharp

Data Analyst

Davianna Stewart

Operations Coordinator

Hannah Hibbs

Strategy Manager

Alexander Vo

Communications Manager

Nikki Torres

Development Manager

Meet Our Board

Dr. Ivan Harrell, II

BOARD CHAIR

President, Tacoma Community College

Katie Condit

VICE CHAIR

President/CEO, Workforce Central

Dave Jones

Treasurer

Owner/Operator, Windermere Abode

Tanisha Jumper

SECRETARY

Chief Communications Officer, Tacoma Public Schools

Dr. Joyce Loveday

AT-LARGE

President, Clover Park Technical College

Stuart Young

AT-LARGE

Managing Director, BCRA

Cassandra Mitchell

Director of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, Providence

Victoria Woodards

Mayor, City of Tacoma

Dr. Lance Goodpaster

Superintendent, Franklin Pierce School District

Dr. Sheila Edwards Lange

Chancellor, University of Washington, Tacoma

Ben Withworth

Chief Operating Officer, Mary Bridge Children's Hospital

Holly Bamford Hunt

Executive Director, Bamford Family Foundation

Nathe Lawver

Secretary Treasurer, Pierce County Central Labor Council

Sandra Eliason​

Chief Communications Officer, Metro Parks Tacoma

Dr. Chio Flores

President, Pierce College Puyallup