Jim is Irvine’s CEO. A native Californian, he is passionate about the Foundation’s mission of expanding opportunity. He also regularly uses Twitter (@jcanales) as a great way to listen and learn. View full bio »
Jim is Irvine’s CEO. A native Californian, he is passionate about the Foundation
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Mar 12, 2013
What does the Irvine Foundation learn by regularly gathering feedback from grantees and other constituents? And how do we integrate those lessons into our work?
How does the Foundation think about “risk” in the context of its grantmaking strategies?
What is the proper role of government in social innovation?
In an interview last week on the Social Velocity blog, Irvine President and CEO Jim Canales discussed these and other questions with Social Velocity President Nell Edgington. The interview is one in a series of monthly discussions that Edgington conducts with leaders in the nonprofit sector. The interview is reprinted here:
Nell: One of the four grantmaking principles of the Irvine Foundation is “Invest in Organizations,” meaning that you are committed to providing grants to build nonprofit organizations (evaluation, operating support, infrastructure). This is a pretty radical idea for most foundations. What do you think holds other foundations back from this kind of investment and what will it take to get more of them to embrace the idea of organization building as opposed to just supporting direct programs?
Jim: This question of general operating support versus project support has been an ongoing debate in the nonprofit sector, and I’d like to suggest that we may be creating for ourselves a false dichotomy that may not be helpful. I’d suggest we focus on the end goal, not the means. Let’s start by asking the question: How can we maximize impact toward the shared goals of a foundation and its grantees? By asking the question in that way, we naturally have to explore whether we are investing sufficient resources, in the right ways, so that our grantee can have the impact we both seek.
Jim is Irvine’s CEO. A native Californian, he is passionate about the Foundation
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Jun 05, 2012
On June 5, the Aspen Institute featured Irvine CEO Jim Canales as part of their Foundation Presidents’ Series of roundtable discussions. The luncheon was hosted by the Aspen Institute’s Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation, which seeks to maximize the impact of the social sector by encouraging collaboration between grantmakers, nonprofits and social enterprises. The Institute hosted Jim in their Washington office for a discussion with over 40 nonprofit leaders and policy experts. In discussion with the Aspen Institute’s Jane Wales, Jim covered some of the key trends and developments in philanthropy. The discussion covered performance assessment, transparency and developments in Irvine’s grantmaking programs. The full 90-minute discussion can be viewed below.
Jim is Irvine’s CEO. A native Californian, he is passionate about the Foundation
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Oct 01, 2010
Dear Friends,
Many ingredients contribute to effective philanthropy, but one of the more important approaches is an authentic commitment to listen and learn from the communities and institutions we support. While we at the Irvine Foundation can certainly do more in this regard — a theme I will turn to later in this letter — I wanted to share some recent activities we have undertaken to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to this approach.
For me, this commitment must start with the governing board. Irvine has built a board that both brings a range of perspectives and experiences to its leadership role and that broadly represents the rich diversity of our state. In addition, for each of the past four years, we have focused one of our quarterly board meetings on opportunities for board members to engage directly with community leaders and to see first hand the work of our partners.
Last year, our board met in Los Angeles, where we explored the challenges and opportunities facing arts organizations in the context of that region’s vibrant arts economy. The previous year we met in Sacramento, where our board heard from our partners in the public policy arena and observed through a site visit the power of the Linked Learning approach to high-school education. And just this year, in early October, we traveled to Fresno, with the goal of deepening the board’s collective understanding of both the challenges and opportunities facing the San Joaquin Valley. This region has been a priority for our funding in recent years based on its rapidly growing population and shifting demographics, a high proportion of low-income residents, and a history of being underserved by traditional philanthropy.
Jim is Irvine’s CEO. A native Californian, he is passionate about the Foundation
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Jul 25, 2010
When Cynthia Gutierrez arrived four years ago at Skyline High School in Oakland, she was neither an academic superstar nor someone who struggled with school. Like most kids, she says, she was "somewhere in the middle." Bored with her classes, she'd left behind a trail of C's and D's, and with some bad luck, she might have even lost interest in school altogether. "I didn't know what I was doing," she says.
Instead, Gutierrez had a stroke of good fortune. During her freshman year, a teacher told her about Skyline's education academy, a small school within the school centered around careers in education. When she heard the program included regular field trips, she signed up. Gutierrez and 25 of her classmates spent the next three years taking classes together on education-related topics like child development and how people learn, combining a rigorous college-prep curriculum with student-teaching trips to local elementary schools. In the close-knit environment of the academy, Gutierrez found new motivation, and she discovered a love of teaching.
"Before, I couldn't really connect with my teachers all that well," she says. "But in the academy, it was different." Gutierrez's grades improved, even with a more demanding course load that qualified her for admission to the state university system. Her teachers say she blossomed into a leader. And in June, she earned something that far too many of California's young people do not: a high school diploma.
Students like Gutierrez are far from the exception in California's public schools, but they aren't nearly as much of the rule as California needs. Over the past 10 years, while graduation rates at high schools across the country have been climbing, many of California's high schools have gotten worse. One out of 3 students in our state still doesn't graduate from high school, severely limiting career options - and sending negative consequences rippling across the state's economy. Barely a third of those who do, meanwhile, are considered "college ready." For students of color and those from low-income households, these numbers are even worse, but for years, education experts have been struggling to find a way to close this widening achievement gap.
Jim is Irvine’s CEO. A native Californian, he is passionate about the Foundation
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Jun 16, 2010
Dear Friends,
California high schools have faced extraordinary challenges this year. State budget cuts and the economic downturn have forced many schools to resort to drastic measures, including teacher layoffs and shorter school years, to balance their budgets. And in a state where students already lag their peers elsewhere in the country in academic achievement, there is concern that these measures will only put them further behind.
Yet there are reasons to be optimistic about California's educational future, including the work of some of our grantees as described in this quarter's letter. The efforts of our partners demonstrate that despite the considerable, short-term fiscal challenges we face, the state's top educational policymakers have not lost sight of longer-term goals that ultimately will have more far-reaching impact on California's young people and our economy.
Last month, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell released a report outlining a bold vision for transforming California's high schools through an approach called Linked Learning. This approach, originally known as Multiple Pathways, seeks to engage more students and prepare them for college and career by combining the best of college-prep academics, demanding technical education and hands-on work experience.
Jim is Irvine’s CEO. A native Californian, he is passionate about the Foundation
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Apr 01, 2009
Dear Friends,
Every March, the Irvine Foundation Board of Directors meets for two days to reflect upon the Foundation’s progress and consider longer-term strategic issues outside of our regular board meeting cycle. This year’s meeting was particularly noteworthy because we comprehensively reviewed all three of Irvine’s core grantmaking programs of Arts, California Perspectives and Youth. We launched these three programs in 2003-04, following a comprehensive planning process, and now with five years of grantmaking behind us, we saw our meeting as an opportunity to discuss what we have learned, what has changed and how we may want to refine the programs. Our annual report later this year will report on some of the specifics for 2008, but I wanted to focus in this letter on some of the broader themes discussed and next steps identified.
Our aspirations in each program area are ambitious and our board reaffirmed its commitment to them over the long term. But we also discussed the value of ongoing refinements in our strategy. We acknowledge that maximizing progress toward our program goals requires that we learn as we go, increase our support for the approaches that work best, and take advantage of opportunities that may arise as we execute our plans.
For example, in the Youth program, we are focusing our grantmaking in a more targeted way on multiple pathways, which we consider a particularly promising approach to high-school reform. You can read more about this refinement in this issue’s Q&A with our Youth Program Director Anne Stanton. Our other two programs — California Perspectives and Arts — are also refining their strategies while staying committed to the goals we set several years ago. We will describe these refinements in upcoming issues of the Irvine Quarterly and through future updates on our Web site.
