Philanthropists will discuss their relationship with wealth and what they are trying to do to address systemic poverty and wealth inequality.
Meet our speakers:
Cathy and her husband, David, joined SVP in 2001. Cathy had spent 10 years in Software Development at Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft before transitioning to staying home with their two young children. Cathy served on the SVP Education grant committee in 2007 which then inspired her to get more involved as a volunteer in local Education efforts. She served on the Bellevue Schools Foundation board for 9 years, several of those years as their VP of Grantmaking. In 2011, Cathy joined the early “volunteer” staff of Eastside Pathways, a cradle-to-career collective action organization in East King County. She now serves as the Eastside Pathways board chair which oversees the nonprofit Eastside Pathways “backbone” and provides a leadership table for the Eastside Pathways Partnership. Because of Cathy’s interest in collective action, she joined the SVP EduCAT committee in 2018 to deepen her knowledge of Collective Action efforts in the Puget Sound region.
David Habib joined Social Venture Partners in 2000, after a career in software development at Microsoft. Since 2000, he has focused exclusively on the nonprofit sector, where he has provided program management and software engineering for database and web-based applications for nonprofits. Along with his wife Cathy, he has been involved in philanthropy and nonprofit work since then.
He has served on two SVP grant committees, and has been an avid technology volunteer, working on database projects for many SVP investees and other Puget Sound area nonprofits including SPEB, Rainier Athletes, Youth Eastside Services, Child Care Resources, New Futures, Washington Environmental Council, Powerful Voices, Seattle SCORES, Groundwire, Rainier Scholars, and many others. He also worked for Salesforce.com’s Foundation, working on software for the nonprofit sector.
Beth McCaw is the founding funder of Threshold Philanthropy, LLC, and with her husband Yahn Bernier, co-founder of the Bernier McCaw Foundation. Beth and Yahn have a long history of giving in their communities, most recently in Washington state, which has been their home since 1998. It’s here that Beth had transformative experiences on the Board of Directors of YWCA of Seattle/King County/Snohomish County and YWCA USA, as President & CEO of Washington Women’s Foundation, and also as a member of the Sisterhood, a community of seven white women and six Black women who are living into what it means to deeply reckon with white supremacy and the wealth gap. As part of the Sisterhood, Beth is actively working to build intergenerational wealth in Black families and at Threshold, through relationship-building and the return of resources, is exploring individual reparative action and how to help people and communities heal.
Srilakshmi (Sri) Remala
Srilakshmi (Sri ) Remala is a Senior Program Officer on the K-12 Solutions team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, focused on scaling high-quality instructional materials through digital experiences for students and educators that build context, motivation and engagement mathematics. Over the last 10 + years, she has focused her career on bringing technology products to market that improve student and teacher outcomes especially for low-income students and students of color. She has led product teams at ed-tech companies like Committee for Children, Agile Mind, and DreamBox Learning and recently developed a mobile app for college students to stay on track to achieve their term goals. Sri began her education sector work as part of the on the ground team of two non-profits in our region, Washington STEM and Community Center for Education Results (CCER). Sri is driven by the belief that where you live and zip code you were born into should not determine the quality of education and opportunities you receive. She is actively involved in her family’s philanthropy effort at The Satya and Rao Remala Foundation and has made investment both locally and abroad in STEM programs, university scholarships and educator development opportunities. The Remala Foundation support for education takes many forms and is rooted in the belief that education opens doors to opportunity and economic mobility. Sri holds a bachelor’s from Carnegie Mellon University and an MPA from UW Evans School of Public Affairs. Sri currently serves on the advisory board for the University of Washington College of Education and Zeno Math.