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An American software entrepreneur and philanthropist, Tim Gill started the Denver, Colorado-based Gill Foundation in 1994. The foundation is dedicated to advancing equality by supporting nonprofit organizations that serve lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and allied individuals, as well as people with HIV/AIDS. Since its inception, the Gill Foundation has invested more than $178 million in nonprofit organizations throughout the country.
Tim has always been an advocate for civil rights. In addition to funding the gay and lesbian movement for equal rights, he is also a strong supporter of social justice organizations and educational institutions. Tim was one of the first major contributors to the Colorado AIDS Project and has long supported local public radio and television through program underwriting. Through the Gay & Lesbian Fund for Colorado, a project of the Gill Foundation, Tim has provided financial support to numerous organizations which serve the general public, including nearly $1 million to the American Red Cross for Hurricane Katrina disaster relief.
Tim is founder and former chairman of Quark, Incorporated. He is recognized for revolutionizing the publishing industry with innovative, affordable, page-layout software. Tim founded Quark, Inc. in 1981 with a $2,000 loan from his parents and worked to build Quark, Inc. into a leading developer of page-layout software.
Tim and his husband, Scott Miller, live in Denver, Colorado.
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Gary Stewart’s lifelong passion for music led to a 30-year career that took him from a part-time record store clerk to a reissue producer for Rhino Records and eventually to his current role at iTunes. Gary’s obsession with unearthing hidden gems in pop culture led to a deep appreciation for artists trying to change or challenge the status quo, such as Bruce Springsteen, Phil Ochs, and much of the 1970s punk movement that included the Clash, X, and The Jam.
At Rhino Records, Gary produced reissues and box sets of music by artists who influenced his record collection and his politics: The Neville Brothers, Elvis Costello, Otis Redding, and the acclaimed “Nuggets” collections of garage rock, among many others.
Educated, influenced, and spurred by the music industry’s growing involvement in the anti-apartheid and anti-censorship movements and particularly affected by a confrontational/inspirational Billy Bragg show, Gary decided to put his politics into practice. He became directly involved in a number of organizations, by doing volunteer work for social service nonprofits such as Turning Point and Ocean Park Community Center, which were focused on L.A.’s growing homeless population.
Seeing the impact these organizations had, Gary expanded his progressive activities, supporting groups that helped increase grassroots political organizing and volunteering with Coalition 88, an organization that worked block-by-block and precinct-by-precinct to encourage residents to take collective action and join civic and electoral efforts in their communities.
At Rhino Records,—a label renowned for its compilations of pop, rock ‘n roll, rhythm and blues, and comedy—Gary felt lucky to work at a company that endorsed and reflected his values. Rhino founders Richard Foos and Harold Bronson—influenced by the socially responsible business movement led by Ben & Jerry’s and The Body Shop—tasked Gary with developing a social mission for Rhino, and with directing a team to create internal policies that reflected what the company considered its second bottom line: its commitment to the community. These policies included up to 40 hours per year of paid time off for employees to engage in volunteer activities, and a weekly voluntary employee payroll deduction that went to agencies providing homeless support services. Rhino also called attention to national nonprofit groups like Amnesty International and the National Coalition for the Homeless by including public service announcements on most of its box-sets, reissues, DVDs and other music and entertainment products.
While he was volunteering at Coalition 88, Gary met Michele Prichard, then Executive Director of Liberty Hill. She helped Gary shape Rhino Records’ social mission and guide its philanthropy. Most significantly, during a 10-year period at Rhino, the company gave more than $2 million—equivalent to 2% of its pretax profits—to L.A.-based nonprofits involved in advocacy, service and activism. Rhino's dollars supported emerging grassroots organizations, such as the L.A. Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), the Community Coalition and the Korean Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), which were tackling issues of poverty and racial inequality with creative and effective proposals to change government, school policies, and business practices.
In 1993, Gary was invited to join Liberty Hill’s board where he accessed his network of personal and professional contacts to support the organization’s activities. He opened his house, wallet, and Rolodex to host fundraisers and recruit donors, board members and volunteers, corralling them to attend Liberty Hill van tours, house parties and panels, and plying them with pop culture CD box-sets, all the while continuing to press Rhino to further its social mission. Working with Liberty Hill, Gary was exposed to issues, leaders, and organizations throughout Los Angeles and helped bring friends in as donors and event supporters.
Through these efforts and many others, Gary has become someone who not only contributes his time and resources to causes, but also works to convince, cajole, and occasionally inspire others to do the same. He continues to support organizations working on a range of issues, such as immigrant rights, living wages, gay and lesbian rights, and increasing access to college prep classes for low-income students. His volunteer activities also include his efforts to persuade nearly everyone he meets to watch “The Wire.”
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The annual Liberty Hill Changemaker Award usually honors a person outside the organization who has had a significant impact on the social justice movement in Los Angeles. This year, Margarita Ramirez’s 30th year of service to Liberty Hill, we have chosen – for the first time ever – to honor one of our own staff.
Beginning in 1981 as Program Associate and since then as Deputy Director of Grantmaking, Margarita has been an institution builder and a change agent. She helped many organizations that are now flourishing to get started, pioneering a process of “seeding” fledgling social justice organizations, something seldom, if ever, done before. She was also integral to the rigorous analysis that let to periodic strategic shifts, for example when Liberty Hill moved away from global to a local focus in grantmaking. She was part of the decision to fund a conference that spear-headed historic community-based responses to the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and she was pivotal to the prescient decision to convene grantees and funding partners to build coalitions to work against the deep disconnects in L.A. society so prevalent during the time of the Rodney King beating.
Says Sylvia Castillo, District Director for Congresswoman Karen Bass, and Margarita’s longtime colleague and friend, “She has not viewed her work at Liberty Hill as activism, but as the result of her institution-building in L.A., political action has been reshaped.”
Margarita came to Liberty Hill as an activist and organizer, bringing with her an already-deep understanding of the social justice movement. She helped define, articulate and put into practice the “change not charity” approach, and she has made sure Liberty Hill continues to be relevant and responsive to the movement for three decades.
She first participated in Liberty Hill Foundation’s grantmaking decisions in 1980 as a member Community Funding Board. At the time, she was working at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center, and a member of El Foro del Pueblo, a bilingual newsletter and Liberty Hill grantee. Although young, she was already a veteran of a decade of activism that had begun with her involvement in the August 29, 1970 Chicano Moratorium demonstration in East L.A.
Margarita, who grew up in Boyle Heights, was discouraged by nuns at her high school from aspiring to college but nevertheless got herself to St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA in 1971, where she promptly started agitating for a Chicano Studies program and taking strong feminist stands in the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (M.E.Ch.A). She immersed herself in student/community statewide organizing as part of Oakland’s Editorial Prensa Sembradora (a propaganda collective). This led her to work in New York with the Federation of Socialist Puerto Rican Students, as well as organizing with several other international solidarity groups before moving back to L.A. for work with the Center for Autonomous Social Action (CASA). She marched with students, community members and also the older generation of Chicano activists including unionists and activists who had been part of the 1940s Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee.
Margarita’s longtime shepherding of Liberty Hill’s grantmaking program has been vital to the strength and longevity of L.A.’s social justice organizations. “She has the values of a political organizer,” says Sylvia Castillo, “And she had the vision that her political work [at Liberty Hill] could be building a conveyor belt for resources so it could have an impact on hundreds of thousands of people. That’s leadership. She’s been able to point the organization in the direction to have relevancy and actually make meaningful transformative change.”
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