Vesper Society’s New Leader Plans to Tell Fund’s Story to Wider Audiences

New job: Miyoko Oshima, a longtime board member of the Vesper Society, will become its president on April 15. The San Francisco operating foundation, founded in 1965, promotes social justice. Key programs include a banking-services effort aimed at needy people in South Africa and health-care and youth programs there and in Northern California.

Career path: Ms. Oshima is now chief operating officer and chief financial officer at the Japanese American National Museum, in Los Angeles, where she has worked since 2007. Previously, she led Southern California Grantmakers and before that was director of projects at the Tides Foundation.

Education: She earned a bachelor’s degree at International Christian University, in Tokyo, and a master’s degree from Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, Calif.

Goals: Along with helping to set the foundation’s long-term agenda, Ms. Oshima hopes to help the group better communicate its mission to a wider audience. She also seeks to help Vesper Society define its niche among other grant makers that work on poverty issues.

How helping the needy is like working for a cultural institution: The common denominator, she says, is storytelling. “There’s a sensitivity to storytelling and how you talk about difficult topics,” she says. “It’s about how do you touch people so they start to change what they do for the better.”

Salary: Ms. Oshima declined to reveal it.

Books she is reading: The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka, and The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison.