Irvine’s Board of Directors approved $14.5 million in grants at its quarterly meeting last week. Of the 53 grants approved, 32 are in the Arts, three in California Democracy, four in our Youth program, 13 in Special Initiatives and one in Special Opportunities. I’d like to highlight some of the grants that we are excited about:

Exploring Engagement Fund – Our Arts program is supporting 19 arts organizations that are experimenting with new ways of engaging audiences and participants as part of our Exploring Engagement Fund. The goal of the new strategy is to promote engagement in the arts for all Californians — the kind that embraces and advances the diverse ways that we experience the arts and that strengthens our ability to thrive together in a dynamic and complex social environment.

Irvine’s Board of Directors approved $16.9 million in grants at its quarterly meeting this week. Of the 31 grants approved, 10 are in the Arts, five in California Democracy, 14 in Youth, one in Special Initiatives, and one in Special Opportunities. I’d like to highlight some grants that we’re excited about:

Exploring Engagement Fund for Large Organizations – Our Arts program is supporting eight large-budget organizations to explore new ideas for engaging audiences as part of our Exploring Engagement Fund for Large Organizations. This is the second set of grants made under our new Arts program strategy (the first round of Exploring Engagement Fund grants was announced in June). The goal of the new strategy is to promote engagement in the arts for all Californians — the kind that embraces and advances the diverse ways that we experience the arts and that strengthens our ability to thrive together in a dynamic and complex social environment.

Irvine’s Board of Directors approved more than $20 million in grants at its quarterly meeting last week. Of the 36 grants approved, 22 in the Arts, nine in California Democracy two in Youth, and one in Special Initiatives. In addition, two Special Opportunities grants were approved. Here are a few grants that we’re particularly excited about:

Exploring Engagement Fund — The grants include the first round under our Exploring Engagement Fund which demonstrates Irvine’s new Arts program strategy in action. The goal of the new strategy is to promote engagement in the arts for all Californians — the kind that embraces and advances the diverse ways that we experience the arts and that strengthens our ability to thrive together in a dynamic and complex social environment. Grants total more than $2 million to 20 arts organizations who are piloting new ideas to engage Californians in the arts.

Families in Schools — A $5.15 million grant was made to continue our Families in Education Initiative, which seeks to engage parents in educational decision making and advance new educational policies and practices in the San Joaquin Valley and Inland Empire. The initiative supports 11 community organizations in those regions and is administered by Los Angeles-based Families in Schools, which provides advice and technical assistance and strategizes with Irvine about how to maximize the initiative’s impact. This grant is part of the California Democracy program, which seeks to advance effective public policy decision making that is reflective of and responsive to all Californians.

ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career — Our Youth program promotes Linked Learning as a new approach to high school education that combines strong academics with real-world experience in a wide range of fields. This $5.725 million grant includes continued funding and substantial support to ConnectEd to serve as the intermediary organization managing the California Linked Learning District Initiative and to provide technical assistance to all nine districts for one additional year. This grant is part of the program’s Linked Learning Practice priority. Grants made as part of Irvine’s Youth program seek 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.

Irvine’s Board of Directors recently took time at their annual retreat to pose the question: What will the most effective foundations of the future look like? On hand to enliven the discussion were three leading experts in the field:

Lucy Bernholz, a highly regarded philanthropy blogger and managing director of Arabella Philanthropic Investment Advisors, discussed forecasts about the social economy that were contained in her Blueprint 2012 report. The social economy, as Bernholz defines it, expands the traditional concept of the space between government and commerce where philanthropy and nonprofits reside to include all of the ways we use private resources to create, fund and distribute public goods. In short, it refers to all the ways that we direct private resources to public goods and Bernholz sees great potential for innovation and collaboration within the field.

Brad Smith, president of the Foundation Center, emphasized the growing importance of data collection, analysis and evaluation within the field of philanthropy. One practice of the best foundations of the future, according to Brad, will be to utilize systems that provide timely and comprehensive data at a global level, leading to increased transparency and an increased ability to identify peers and collaborators on issues.

More than $4 million in grants was approved last week by the Irvine board at its quarterly meeting. The board approved 10 grants — four in the Arts, four in California Democracy and two in Youth — and signed off on a total grants budget of $68 million for this year. Here are a few grants that we’re particularly excited about:

California Calls — With California’s finances in an historic bind, an alliance of civic and community organizations, known as California Calls, is pursuing an ambitious plan to help turn things around. Partnering with 25 organizations in 10 counties, the alliance has been educating working class people on issues of state fiscal policy that are normally the province of policy experts and think tanks. With an $800,000 grant, its second from Irvine, California Calls aims to expand its growing alliance to other parts of California, with the goal of reaching half a million voters and energizing them around the cause of improving the state’s fiscal system. The grant, part of Irvine’s California Democracy program, was made to the Los Angeles-based Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education, the lead organization for California Calls.

California School Boards Foundation — Our Youth program promotes Linked Learning as a new approach to high school education that combines strong academics with real-world experience in a wide range of fields. With a $400,000 grant, the California School Boards Foundation will raise awareness of Linked Learning among California school board members and district leadership teams. CSBF plans to implement a statewide educational program for newly elected and veteran school board members and district governance teams to showcase the Linked Learning approach. It also plans to identify obstacles to implementing Linked Learning and assist governance teams in developing policies that ensure its success, part of a broader effort to build the Linked Learning field in California and make it an option for more students.

Cornerstone Theater — The Los Angeles-based Cornerstone Theater takes community-based theater in California to an entirely new level. Under one of its programs, long supported by Irvine, Cornerstone each year selects an underserved California community for an in depth collaboration. Professional artists live and work alongside local residents to create a new play informed by local issues. The play is then performed by professional and amateur actors at performance sites central and meaningful to the community. The company has already produced eight well-received plays in California communities, and with a new $425,000 grant from Irvine, Cornerstone will bring its unique approach to the cities of Arvin (Kern County) and Salinas.

To the national debate about whether students should pursue career and technical education or college preparation, a California program wants to add an emphatic declaration: Yes.

The refusal to choose between one instructional emphasis or the other symbolizes the work being done to build career pathways in nine school districts as part of Linked Learning, an initiative cited as a national model of career and technical education.

One of the places the project is unfolding is in a cluster of high schools in the Porterville Unified School District, which serves a predominantly Latino, low-income community here among the San Joaquin Valley’s olive and orange groves.

At one school, a half-dozen students huddle around big desktop computers. The complex formulas they’re calculating and programming into the computer will tell a robot how to restack blocks of blue and red cubes. When they give the robot the command, the job comes off perfectly. Barely old enough to drive, these students are learning to negotiate the real-world engineering that shapes manufacturing.

When they’re not in classrooms, students from these schools are out in the community, working in local engineering companies, staging musicals with preschoolers, or helping design sound for a street concert.

The point, leaders of the work say, is to create a more relevant, engaging school experience for young people by blending the rigorous core academics they need for college with the career and technical education that prepares them for good jobs, and to do it in an applied, hands-on way that includes real-life work experience.

When rigorous academics are combined with demanding technical learning and real-world experience, students are better prepared to succeed after high school. Embracing that Linked Learning model, the Center for Advanced Research and Technology (CART), a high school in Clovis, Calif., released data on Jan. 11 that clearly shows Linked Learning can lead to a higher percentage of college enrollments.

The seven-year study found that participation in CART's Linked Learning approach increased the community college entrance rate by 11 percentage points — 71 percent for CART students compared with 60 percent for a demographically similar group of non-CART students. Entrance rates to four-year colleges were also higher for CART students. Read the CART report or the news release announcing the results.

"The message is clear: When students see a connection between what they're learning today and what they're earning tomorrow, they're more successful in the classroom, in college and, ultimately, in the workplace," said California's Superintendent of Instruction Tom Torlakson, as part of the study's release.

Rochelle Treger has a smile and a word of encouragement for each of her students as they walk into her student-teaching seminar at San Diego State University, straight from their own demanding stints in local public schools. Even after a hard day's work peppered with the typical challenges of student-teaching — from quieting rowdy classes to getting kids to finish their homework — the enthusiasm is palpable as students pass through the door.

"In a lot of ways, we're the lucky ones," says Angela Holbrook, a soon-to-be chemistry teacher who spends her days teaching 11th graders at the Kearny High Educational Complex's School of Digital Media and Design. "It's a lot to handle; I still have to get my lesson plan done for tomorrow. But we have a goal that makes it worth it. We're trying to get hired by Linked Learning schools."

Learning to be a teacher is rarely painless, and Holbrook isn't the only student teacher struggling to figure out how best to manage a high school classroom. But she and her classmates say they are more optimistic than many of their peers enrolled in other teaching seminars. San Diego State is a leader among a growing number of California universities that have recently adopted a modified teaching credential program designed to prepare student teachers for the state's expanding — and increasingly popular — network of Linked Learning schools.