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By The Vanguard Staff
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – A leading racial and social justice grantmaking foundation organization in the Bay Area and nationally Tuesday has named a youth justice strategist as its senior program officer.
The Rosenberg Foundation, which has made 3,000 grants totaling more than $85 million to regional, statewide and national organizations advocating for social and economic justice, appointed Christina “Krea” Gomez, who has spent more than 20 years as an organizer for racial justice in California and across the country.
Created in 1935 through the bequest of California business leader Max L. Rosenberg, the Foundation said Gomez will play a major role towards the foundation’s commitment to “ensuring “every person in California has an equal opportunity to participate fully in the state’s economic, social, and political life.”
“I am thrilled to welcome Krea to the Rosenberg Foundation team,” said Tim Silard, president of the Rosenberg Foundation. “Anyone who has known Krea in her decades of experience in this work knows that she is a force of nature who is deeply grounded in community. We are fortunate to have her trusted leadership, strategic brilliance, and get-it-done energy to fuel our work to change the odds for Californians.”
Silard said Gomez’s work will include supporting the Foundation’s Leading Edge Fund and its current and alumni fellows, noting the Leading Edge Fund seeds, incubates and accelerates bold ideas from the next generation of progressive movement leaders in California.
Gomez will also “play a leadership role in the Foundation’s criminal legal system, youth justice, and farmworker and Indigenous justice funding strategies, deepening partnerships with leaders and organizations on the front lines of fighting for change,” the foundation said in a statement.
“I am so excited to join the Rosenberg family,” said Gomez. “For almost 90 years, Rosenberg has been instrumental in supporting racial and social justice organizations in the Bay Area and beyond to improve outcomes for young people, migrant workers, families and more. It is an honor to be part of this legacy and to use the power of philanthropy to continue my life-long work of seeking justice.”
Gomez was a Leading Edge Fellow with the Rosenberg Foundation and also served as a Strategic Program Advisor to shape the fellowship program. Gomez’s work focused on “replacing punitive and dehumanizing systems with a comprehensive new architecture that provides young people with the support and resources they need to address their trauma, heal and thrive,” the foundation said.
Gomez, who said she believes in community-initiated solutions, was a worker at the Young Women’s Freedom Center as a youth more than 27 years ago, and, said the foundation, “helped build the Center Into one of the preeminent justice reform organizations in the state, one that raises up movement and community leaders, changes the narrative about systems-impacted people, and transforms programs, practices and systems.”
Gomez is a founding member of the Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition, “the largest member-led coalition organizing formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted women and trans people of all genders to end mass incarceration and win justice, opportunity, and self-determination,” according to the foundation.
Gomez was also Dean of Students & School Culture at the North Oakland Community Charter School (NOCCS) and served as a Regional Program Manager at the W. Haywood Burns Institute, where she co-managed the Community Justice Network for Youth (CJNY), a national network of over 140 organizations working to reduce racial disparities in the juvenile justice system, the foundation noted. 
