The Libra Foundation Announces Appointments of Kathryn Snyder & maisha quint
San Francisco (CA) – The Libra Foundation is pleased to announce the hiring of Kathryn Snyder and maisha quint who will lead The Libra Foundation’s criminal justice grantmaking strategy. Criminal justice is one of three program areas in which The Libra Foundation focuses its grantmaking, along with environmental justice and gender justice.
“We are thrilled to add Kathryn and maisha to our team,” said Crystal Hayling, Executive Director of The Libra Foundation. “Both of them are deeply committed to reimagining this country’s broken criminal justice system, and their commitment to community will strengthen Libra’s effectiveness.”
As a Senior Advisor at Tides Advocacy, Kathryn provided financial, programmatic, philanthropic and legal support to a range of criminal justice-focused entities. Kathryn has several years of legal experience as a staff attorney, associate, and law clerk at firms in both San Diego and San Francisco, including time at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office under Kamala Harris. A 2018 Criminal Justice Fellow at the Women’s Policy Institute, Founding Member of the Bay Area Chapter of Law for Black Lives, and Chair of the CA Criminal Justice Funders Group, Kathryn is an ardent advocate for dismantling mass incarceration and recognizes its intersection with racial and gender justice.
“I’m incredibly blessed to join the forward-thinking team at Libra,” said Kathryn. “Under Crystal’s leadership, they have centered Libra’s grantmaking in racial and gender equity and prioritize organizations led by people of color and those who are directly impacted by an incredibly racist and unjust system. maisha and I will work together to support strategies that shrink the prison industrial complex, reform unjust laws, and provide holistic, community-based alternatives to incarceration.”
With two decades of on-the-ground social justice leadership, maisha served as a San Francisco Foundation Multicultural Fellow, Community Programs Director at EastSide Arts Alliance, and Communications Director and Family Advocacy Coordinator at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. As a passionate community organizer and believer in self-determination in marginalized communities, maisha has campaigned with Committee to Free the San Francisco 8, Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and more.
“I am very excited to work with Kathryn and the Libra team to support the critical work happening across the country to transform our current system into one of true safety, support and self-determination,” said maisha. “I am so heartened by Libra’s commitment to the credo ‘nothing about us, without us.’”
The Libra Foundation’s guiding principle is that those who are closest to the issues understand those issues the best. They are not only the most equipped to build solutions, they are the most effective at implementing those solutions. The Libra Foundation is a family foundation with an endowment of $480 million invested for impact. Over the past decade, the Foundation has granted over $60 million to 192 grantee partners in the areas of criminal justice reform, environmental justice, and gender justice.