Miki Akimoto
FFI Board Chair; Chief Impact Officer, National Center for Family Philanthropy
Miki Akimoto is the Chief Impact Officer at the National Center for Family Philanthropy. In this role, she partners with the CEO to help move the NCFP strategic plan forward, align and integrate revenue, relationship management and program strategies, enhance sector partnerships and ensure a strong measurement and evaluation plan. She oversees the program, communications and development teams.
Most recently, Miki served as a Senior Philanthropic Strategist at Bank of America’s Private Bank. In that role, she provided consultation and support to families, foundations and major nonprofits about their governance, grantmaking and impact strategies. Prior to joining the Bank of America, Miki was Vice President and then Acting President of Philanthropy Massachusetts, the regional association of foundations, corporate givers and other key donors in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. She has also served as the first Director of Grants Management for the Annie E. Casey Foundation and as a program officer at the Corporation for National Service/AmeriCorps.
She is actively involved in the philanthropic community nationally and locally. She chairs the board of TSNE MissionWorks and also serves as Clerk of the board of the Full Frame Initiative. Past board experience includes Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, YWCA Boston, the Boston Foundation for Architecture, and the Forum of Regional Associations of Grant Makers. She is a co-founder of the Saffron Circle, the first Asian Giving Circle in Massachusetts.
She holds a Bachelor of Political Science degree from Stanford University, and lives in Medford, Massachusetts. In her spare time, she bakes, reads, and travels to far flung places whenever she can.
Tim Decker
FFI Board Treasurer; Senior Consultant, Social Innovation Partners
Tim served as the Director of the Missouri Division of Youth Services from 2007-2013 and Director of the Missouri Children’s Division from 2013-2018. Tim retired from state government in 2018, after serving for 34 years in a variety of leadership positions with the Missouri Department of Social Services and the Greater Kansas City Local Investment Commission (LINC), one of the nation’s most innovative public/private community partnerships.
After serving for over 11 years as an agency director, Tim founded Social Innovation Partners to support leaders interested in government, community, non-profit, and private-sector innovation in child welfare, juvenile justice, education, and youth development.
Jose Faus
Independent Artist
José Faus is a native of Bucaramanga, Colombia and longtime Kansas City resident. He is an artist, writer, performer and independent teacher/mentor with an interest in the role of artists as catalysts for community building. He is a co-founder of the Latino Writers Collective and sits on the boards of Latino Writers Collective, UMKC Board of Governors Alumni Association, and Charlotte Street Foundation.
His writing appears in various anthologies and journals. His chapbook “This Town Like That” was released by Spartan Press. His second book of poetry “The Life and Times of Jose Calderon” was published by West 39 Press. He has participated in large scale mural programs regionally and internationally. He maintains Carido Studio, a fine arts studio in downtown Kansas City.
Katya Fels Smyth
Founder and CEO, Full Frame Initiative
Katya grew up in New Jersey and went to high school in Massachusetts, where she volunteered at one of the state’s first shelters for homeless families. While getting a degree in biology from Harvard, Katya continued working with people who are homeless, eventually becoming co-director of one of Cambridge, MA’s first emergency shelters. A hit-and-run of one of the shelter’s guests, uninvestigated by police, combined with the advice and vision of other shelter guests, led her to found Cambridge-based On The Rise, Inc. in 1995. On The Rise was widely recognized for its Full Frame Approach to working with women facing homelessness, trauma, and crisis.
In 2007, Katya left to work on what would become the Full Frame Initiative. She launched FFI’s systemic collaborations that are bringing a wellbeing orientation to Missouri’s juvenile justice and child welfare systems and the St. Louis County courts, and a multi-system effort in Massachusetts to reframe the government’s approach to the intersection of homelessness, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
A former Research Affiliate with MIT’s Community Innovators Lab, Research Fellow at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Echoing Green Fellow and Claneil Foundation Emerging Leaders Fellow, Katya speaks, publishes and advocates nationally for addressing poverty, violence, trauma, and oppression by removing barriers to wellbeing. She has an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the Episcopal Divinity School, and a deep belief in the power of people to do good by and for each other. This, combined with her sense that our country isn’t fully living into that potential, feed her commitment to FFI, bolstered by amazing colleagues and copious coffee consumption. Katya is a terrible gardener and decent cook who lives in Western Massachusetts with her amazing husband and kids, and an unwieldy menagerie of dogs, cats and donkeys.
Lotus Yu
FFI Staff Representative to the Board
Lotus is part of the Engagement & Partnerships Team at FFI, collaborating on strategy for how to support people in shifting towards using a wellbeing orientation, developing capacity building and training materials, teaching, and supporting curriculum development.
Lotus holds an MPH/MSW from the University of Michigan. While living in Michigan and working for human services in county government, she also was involved with MISSION, a nonprofit organization supporting homeless tent cities. With this organization, she saw the importance of supporting the whole person. When people were having to make significant tradeoffs for shelter that were unsustainable—because they would be giving up friends, community or stability—what worked was helping to reduce those costs with bus tokens, encouraging people to have a voice, being part of a community, and more. It is this experience that most helped Lotus connect with FFI’s approach to understanding people and the importance of shifting systems to focus on wellbeing, not simply on fixing problems. Lotus also comes with teaching experience on the Texas-Mexico border and in Macedonia. When she is not at FFI, she is doing one of a million hobbies, including but not limited to: cooking, knitting, circus, running, hiking, biking, crafting and playing violin.