Last week the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation invited a diverse group of foundation staff, evaluation professionals and social media experts to talk about measurement and evaluation of social media. You can get a feel for some of the topics and ideas that were shared by reading the Twitter activity captured by the hashtag #SM_RE. RWJF has also captured and organized the material related to this meeting on its website.

Building leadership is one of Irvine’s core values, and one of the ways we try to realize that value is through the Fund for Leadership Advancement. Started in 2005, the fund supports the development of individual leaders as a way to increase the impact of existing Irvine grantee organizations. Although the fund has been on hiatus while we conducted a program review, we are restarting this leadership development initiative and sharing what we’ve learned from our work in this area.

As we reached a critical mass of more than 50 FLA grants, we decided to take stock of FLA and consider updates that would insure that the program takes into account the economic and social circumstances our grantees currently face. In order to review the impact of FLA, we commissioned Harder+Company Community Research to conduct an external assessment of these grants and help us understand where and how FLA has had the greatest impact.

As part of our Special Initiatives grantmaking, we fund research on occasion that can help us understand the trends and issues facing the nonprofit sector. After all, we can only accomplish our mission through the hard work of the nonprofit organizations that we partner with. Understanding the nonprofit environment helps us do a better job of aligning our grant support with their needs and opportunities.

A great example of Irvine-funded research along these lines was released on January 31 by the UCLA Center for Civil Society. Since 2003 the center has published annual reports on the state of the nonprofit sector in Los Angeles; this year’s report focused on how the recession is affecting  human service organizations. The report, Stressed and Stretched: The Recession, Poverty and Human Services Nonprofits in Los Angeles, shows how reduced revenues from government and individuals has caused nonprofits to do more with less at a time when the number of Angelenos in need of social services is growing. Nonprofits serving the lowest income neighborhoods, and those serving African Americans in particular, have been hardest hit.