May-June 2005

Dear Friends,

In describing the Foundation's grantmaking program in Youth and its particular focus on low-income Californians between the ages of 14 and 24, I have often heard the critique that we should focus our efforts on younger children. Indeed, if one looks at the funding landscape today, significant philanthropic and government resources are focusing on early childhood, and appropriately so. Research underscores the importance of development during a child's early years and the wisdom of these investments.

Our concern at the Irvine Foundation is that, with some significant exceptions, adolescents and young adults are not receiving the attention they deserve. As young people reach a critical age when they are transitioning from adolescence into young adulthood - in an economic environment that is complex and highly competitive - they are all too often left on their own to navigate this transition with little support and few engaging options to pursue.

To address this need, our Youth program seeks to increase the number of low-income youth in California who complete high school on time and attain a postsecondary credential by the age of 25. In partnership with others, we advance this goal through grants that seek to increase student retention, improve academic performance, and promote stronger connections to career and community. Posted on our Web site you will find a more detailed set of grantmaking priorities for our Youth program, which I invite you to review.

We have organized our Youth program under the umbrella of "multiple pathways," an approach that has growing support in the academic community and is the focus of a feature article in the current edition of the Irvine Quarterly. This approach recognizes that in order to ensure that the broadest number of young people can succeed, in secondary and postsecondary education as well as in the working world, our educational institutions should establish a variety of viable pathways to suit the diverse needs, backgrounds, and interests of our young people. Toward this end, we support programs that embrace a wide range of learning styles, that recognize the significant number of students who will go on to something other than a four-year college experience, and that infuse academic education with ties to the broader world of career, community, and citizenship.

We realize that our ability to make grants offers a powerful tool to help low-income students successfully make the transitions from high school to college to career. We also believe that the Foundation's active engagement in selective, non-grantmaking activities related to our goal is important as well. To that end, I am delighted to report that Anne Stanton, our Youth Program Director, was recently appointed by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell to a newly created "California P-16 Council." The Council has been charged with the development of strategies to better coordinate, integrate, and improve education for California students from preschool through college, and we hope to contribute to this vital effort by connecting Irvine's work to the Council's efforts.

The strategies we are pursuing under our Youth program are necessarily broad. They acknowledge that a complex, multifaceted problem requires an integrated, multipronged response. As we support a broad range of approaches to address this issue, we are committed to learning which strategies yield the best results for low-income youth and, accordingly, to ensuring our strategies evolve over time. We are also committed to communicating what we learn with you.

As always, I welcome and appreciate your comments and suggestions about this update or any aspect of our work.

Sincerely,

James E. Canales
President and CEO

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