The Seattle-based Marguerite Casey Foundation has announced CARMEN ROJAS as its next president and CEO. Rojas currently serves on the foundation's board of directors and will transition into her new role on June 1, 2020. In 2014, Rojas founded The Workers Lab, which, under her leadership, has become one of the nation’s leading supporters of new ideas about ways to increase worker power in the United States. Prior to starting that organization, Rojas served as acting director of collective impact at Living Cities, where she focused on improving economic opportunity for low-income people by supporting projects in economic and workforce development, energy efficiency, and asset building, and as director of strategic grantmaking at the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, where she oversaw the foundation's Green Access and Civic Engagement programs. Rojas also taught in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a Fulbright Scholar in 2007.

Chicago-based Feeding America has announced the appointment of KATIE FITZGERALD as chief operating officer and executive vice president, effective January 13, 2020. Fitzgerald comes to the organization, the nation's largest network of food banks, from the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, where she has served as CEO for the past three years. Prior to joining that organization, she served as president and CEO of Make-a-Wish Oklahoma; as executive director at the Center for Children and Families in Norman, Oklahoma; as director for the Women's Leadership Initiative at the University of Oklahoma's Carl Albert Center; and as head of the Oklahoma Afterschool Network at the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy. Earlier in her career, Fitzgerald served as a program director with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and held several leadership positions with United Way of Greater Battle Creek in Michigan.

The Vera Institute of Justice in New York City announced the appointment of TERRANCE PITTS as chief of staff. In that role, a new one for the organization, Pitts will help guide the organization's Race, Equity and Inclusion program as part of Vera's commitment to dismantling racism within the organization itself as well as society more broadly. Trained as a lawyer, Pitts began his career in the criminal justice reform field while serving as a New Voices Fellow for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Most recently, he served as senior advisor for the Ford Foundation's Gender, Racial and Ethnic Justice unit, where he managed a grantmaking portfolio aimed at ending mass incarceration in the United States. Prior to joining the staff of Ford, Pitts worked as a program officer for the Open Society Foundations and as an independent strategy consultant supporting the development of new criminal justice reform efforts for organizations such as Borealis Philanthropy and the Center on Race, Inequality and the Law at NYU School of Law.

The Blue Shield of California Foundation has announced the appointment of ANNIE Z. WONG as its new director of finance, operations, and grants. In that role, Wong will lead day-to-day oversight of the organization's administrative and financial operations, including its accounting and grants management functions. Wong previously served as senior manager of technical accounting, reporting, and governance at Blue Shield of California, as a senior auditor at Franklin Templeton Investments in San Mateo, and at Deloitte & Touche, LLP, in San Francisco. She holds a BS in business administration from the University of California at Berkeley.

In other news, Communities In Schools board chair Elaine Wynn has announced that DALE ERQUIAGA will be stepping down as president and CEO of the Virginia-based organization on March 31, 2020, and will become a visiting fellow at the organization's Milliken Center for Innovation and Student Success. In that role, Erquiaga will consult with the next leader of the organization and support expansion and sector entrepreneurship strategies in support of the CIS business plan. Wynn praised Erquiaga for his leadership of the organization and efforts to ensure that every child in America has a community of support inside and outside of the classroom. "I have worked alongside Dale for many years, first in Nevada and now at Communities In Schools. In that time, he has earned my admiration for his sharp business intellect, great insights about the state of education in our country, and compassion for the cause of children," she said. "I know this was a difficult decision for Dale. He has a fierce dedication to serving the needs of all children, and hundreds of thousands of young people have benefited from his work. But I know that Dale's passion for this work is grounded in his own family story. He is a single father and now a new grandfather. He has decided to be closer to his own family so he can be involved in the lives of his grandchildren. While I am sad to see him go, I admire his reasoning." Erquiaga will work closely with the CIS national board to implement a comprehensive search process for his successor.