Marion Standish joined The California Endowment with an extensive legal and philanthropic background.
As director for The Endowment’s Community Health and Elimination of Health Disparities program, she leads the foundation’s efforts to develop initiatives to address the health disparities and environmental factors that contribute to the poor health of underserved communities. In that capacity, Standish serves as lead officer on many of The Endowment’s major funding initiatives, including
Healthy Eating Active Communities, which supports community coalitions to develop and implement policies and programs to reduce obesity;
Community Action To Fight Asthma, which focuses on reducing environmental triggers for asthma among school-aged children; and,
The Partnership for the Public’s Health, a five-year program designed to build strong, effective partnerships between local public health departments and the communities they serve. She also designed The Endowment’s partnership project with The Rockefeller Foundation,
California Works for Better Health, a four-year effort to build the capacity of community-based organizations to improve neighborhood health status through regional employment strategies.
Previously, Standish served as a senior program officer for The Endowment. In that capacity, she managed the foundation’s San Francisco office and was responsible for overseeing the grant-making activities in the Bay Area. She conducted outreach to organizations to increase their awareness of funding opportunities, reviewed health-related grant proposals from community-based organizations, helped to develop programs to assist underserved communities and monitored a portfolio of foundation grants.
Prior to joining The Endowment, Standish was founder and director of California Food Policy Advocates (CFPA), a statewide nutrition and health research and advocacy organization focusing on access to nutritious food for low-income families. Before launching CFPA, she served as director of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, a statewide advocacy organization focusing on health, education and labor issues facing farmworkers and the rural poor. She began her career as a staff attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance, a federally funded legal services program.
Standish serves on the board of directors of the Food Research and Action Center, the San Francisco Community Boards Program, and the Neighborhood Funders Group. She was recently appointed by California’s Chief Justice to the Judicial Council’s Legal Services Trust Fund Commission and by Mayor Gavin Newsom to San Francisco’s Children Youth and Families Commission. She received her J.D. from the University of San Francisco School of Law, and both her M.A. and undergraduate degrees from New York University.
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