Barbara Webster-Hawkins

Barbara Webster-Hawkins is Executive Director, Resource Development at the Foundation for California Community Colleges. Facilitating collaboration, accelerating innovation, and increasing resources, Webster-Hawkins directly impacts the Foundation’s mission success. A grants expert, Webster-Hawkins stimulates the Foundation’s year-over-year growth through her participatory leadership, strategic oversight, and proven skill sets in resource development. Webster-Hawkins also leads fiscal sponsorship and management services, a key component of the Foundation’s strategy to collaborate for impact by supporting the success of organizations and programs that share the Foundation’s values and priorities.

A member of the Advancement team, Webster-Hawkins closely collaborates with the Foundation’s executive team, program directors and managers, finance team, and communications experts and with the Chancellor’s Office to facilitate planning, build consensus, and guide the organization’s resource development efforts and grantmaking. Joining the organization in 2014 as its Director of Grants Development, she was named Executive Director in 2018.

Webster-Hawkins has more than 30 years’ experience in grantmaking, change initiatives, and community services for children, youth, families, and communities in California. She previously led community grantmaking in 28 Northern California counties for The California Endowment, the state’s largest health philanthropy, and then managed the awarding of hundreds of millions of dollars in bond-funded grants for children’s hospitals as Treasury Program Manager for the California Health Facilities Financing Authority. Prior, Webster-Hawkins served as the executive director for two community based organizations providing direct services to children and families and on multiple nonprofit board of directors and advisory boards. She is a volunteer advocate for increasing foster care adoptions and improving California’s child welfare and education systems, particularly for children and youth that have experienced trauma and those with disabilities.

Webster-Hawkins earned her bachelor of arts in international studies, comparative cultures from the University of the Pacific, and her master of nonprofit administration from the University of San Francisco.