Proteus Fund is excited to welcome Vina Kay as the new Director of the Piper Fund. Vina comes to Proteus Fund from Race Forward, where she served as its Vice President of Movement Capacity Building, managing a team that works with leaders in communities across the country to develop organizing and policy tools and strategies to create a healthy ecosystem of racial justice organizing. She also served on Race Forward’s senior leadership team, helping to guide the organization in its strategic direction, fundraising, and operations. In her previous role at Voices for Racial Justice in Minnesota, where she worked for nearly eight years, Vina strengthened the organization at every level, including doubling its budget and staff within two years of becoming its Executive Director in 2014. Throughout her career, she’s worked with a range of institutional funders and has both led campaigns and written extensively about the intertwining of democracy and racial justice.

In appointing Vina to this critical role in the democracy funding landscape, Proteus Fund is leaning in on the Piper Fund’s truest strength, namely an unwavering dedication to grassroots and grasstops organizing; service to local leadership and movement; and a foregrounding of racial justice. We know that so many of the roadblocks that bedevil our vision of a truly representative democracy in the US are inextricably tied to pervasive racism from this country’s founding until today. Vina’s hiring is a doubling down and amplification of Piper’s core theories of change, the theories of change that have brought this program so far.

With the addition of Vina as Piper’s new director, Proteus Fund is taking another step forward in redefining and centering all of our work on fully advancing justice, equity, and inclusive democracy.