Andrea Caupain Sanderson | Interim Managing Director

Andrea (she/her/hers) is the interim managing director of the Black Future Co-op Fund, and a founding architect. She leads the Fund in service of our mission to ignite Black generational wealth, health, and well-being across Washington.

For more than 25 years, Andrea has worked to advance racial equity and economic mobility for people across Washington state. As an immigrant to this country at the age of 12 and a single mother at 19, Andrea knows how it feels to be marginalized and struggling to make ends meet. Throughout her career, Andrea has translated her lived experience, coupled with her determination, to forge solutions to systemic barriers to opportunity.

Andrea is co-founder and co-executive director of the BIPOC Executive Directors Coalition, a multi-cultural, statewide collaborative of nonprofit leaders of color who are uniting through healing and advocacy to generate shared abundance in communities. Most recently, she served as CEO of Byrd Barr Place, a Black-led organization that empowers people to live healthy, prosperous lives through essential services and advocacy. In addition, Andrea chairs the Equitable Recovery and Reconciliation Alliance and serves on the boards of Craft3, Crescent Collaborative, and Lorna Jordan Foundation. She is also a steering committee member of the Washington Black Lives Matter Alliance. Andrea earned a Master of Public Administration and a Bachelor of Arts from Evergreen State College.

She lives in Skyway with her husband and two children, whom she appreciates learning from every day. Andrea is also an avid runner, who has completed Seattle’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon nine times.

Lanessa Cerrillo | Administrative Associate

As the administrative associate, Lanessa (she/her/hers) provides day-to-day organizational and operational support for the Black Future Co-op Fund. With a strong passion for community building, she aims to create inclusive environments and equitable opportunities for Black and Brown people. Lanessa identifies as Black, Mexican, Filipina and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and values the ancestral knowledge and guidance she has gained from all the strong women who raised her. She says her cultural background and community-centered upbringing have greatly influenced her work. 

Most recently, Lanessa was a program director for Project Girl Mentoring Program, a nonprofit organization that provides mentoring services to young girls of color. Lanessa participated in the program as a young teen, and was overjoyed to serve the community that once served her. Prior to that, she taught at the Experimental Education Unit at the University of Washington. She is a proud UW alum, where she earned a bachelor’s in education. 

Lanessa currently serves on the board of the Indipino Community and Vicinity, a family nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness of the history of the Indipino community of Bainbridge Island. She is also a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. In Lanessa’s spare time, she enjoys reading, traveling, being outdoors, and spending time with her friends and family.

Stephen Robinson | Director of Community Engagement & Learning

Stephen (he/him/his) leads the Black Future Co-op Fund’s community listening, engagement, and learning endeavors to build a powerful network of Black people, groups, and organizations across Washington’s 39 counties. As a half Black man, he has always played the role of a bridge and a community builder. He will use these talents collaboratively with nonprofits and community leaders to drive positive change and resource redistribution to further Black liberation. Since 2014, he served as a senior philanthropic advisor and a scholarship program manager at Seattle Foundation, and before that as a community development project manager at LDA Struga, a regional United Nations Development Programme office in Macedonia, where he was a Peace Corps volunteer.

He has been a longtime volunteer with the Pride Foundation, in both their grant and scholarship programs. He is a board trustee for the Friends of Educational Opportunity Program at the University of Washington, an advisory to the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity that promotes academic excellence for underrepresented students impacted by educational and economic injustices. Stephen is also a teaching assistant for a Bastyr class called "Spiritual identity,” and is apprenticed to the medicine woman who teaches the course.

A chartered advisor in philanthropy (CAP), Stephen has a bachelor’s in religious studies from Humboldt State University and an MPA from the University of Washington. He lives in Rainier Beach, and when he’s not working, you can find him knitting, listening to books while walking around Seward Park, or making bolo ties out of buffalo teeth.