Jim is Irvine’s CEO. A native Californian, he is passionate about the Foundation
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Jul 01, 2011
Dear Friends,
Demonstrating transparency about our work remains a key aspiration for us at The James Irvine Foundation. Toward that end, we have recently experimented with new and different ways of communicating as well as new approaches to solicit feedback about our efforts. We have engaged in these activities not just for transparency’s sake, but as importantly, to encourage more of a two-way dialogue with our grantee partners and other stakeholders in an effort to listen and learn. My quarterly letter will focus on what we have tried, our rationale behind these activities, and what we are learning at this early stage.
In the past few months, we have experimented with the use of multimedia content. We’ve used videos and audio slide shows to summarize two major reports, our Grantee Perception Report and 2010 Annual Performance Report, and we’ve also used multimedia to help explain a shift in our Arts grantmaking strategy. This use of audio and video ensures we are taking advantage of a broader range of online communications tools, and we will continue to experiment with ways to make our work more accessible and to communicate more clearly.
Hand in hand with the greater use of multimedia content has been a conscious focus on encouraging more interactivity through Irvine’s communications. In June, when we announced our new Arts grantmaking strategy, we conducted a webinar for the first time and had more than 250 grantees and other participants. The purpose was not only to allow grantees to ask questions of us but also to begin what we hope will be a vigorous and robust dialogue that will help us to shape and flesh out our new Arts strategy over the coming months.
Jim is Irvine’s CEO. A native Californian, he is passionate about the Foundation
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Jul 01, 2011
Our 2010 Annual Performance Report represents a new approach to our reporting on the work of the Irvine Foundation. While it provides many of the features of our traditional annual report, such as a complete listing of 2010 grants, it aims to improve on that approach by providing more detail and analysis about the Foundation's progress across various dimensions of our work.
This publication is based on a report that we make each year to Irvine's Board of Directors as a way to measure our progress and hold ourselves accountable to our long-term goals. Although we have made that report publicly available in the past, this year we have combined it with our traditional annual report into a single online publication targeted at a broader audience of the Foundation's stakeholders. It includes an introductory video by our President and CEO, Jim Canales.
Our report looks at Irvine's performance in two broad areas that we believe are important to understanding our impact:
As Communications Officer, Ray Delgado oversees various communications initiativ
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Jun 17, 2011
San Francisco — The Board of Directors of The James Irvine Foundation has approved 15 grants totaling more than $17.6 million in support of the Foundation's mission of expanding opportunity for the people of California to participate in a vibrant, successful and inclusive society. (For a list of approved grants, click here.)
Advancing Innovative Ideas and Initiatives
Grants approved as part of the Arts program were made as part of the Arts Innovation Fund, which supports the state’s larger, established arts institutions, and included the Berkeley Repertory Theatre ($1 million), the Pacific Symphony ($850,000), and the San Francisco Ballet Association ($900,000). Irvine’s Arts program seeks to promote a vibrant and inclusive artistic and cultural environment in California.
Fostering Informed Public Involvement and Decision Making
Grants approved as part of the California Democracy program align with its Civic Engagement priority, including a grant to TransForm CA ($550,000) to engage diverse communities in the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California in major land use decisions. Irvine’s California Democracy program seeks to advance effective public policy decision making that is reflective of and responsive to all Californians.
Jim is Irvine’s CEO. A native Californian, he is passionate about the Foundation
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May 12, 2011
From the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, May 12, 2011
As I leave a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), I find myself reflecting on our progress as a field in understanding what exactly constitutes “effective philanthropy.” At the heart of CEP’s approach has been collecting data to learn more about the practices that may contribute to effectiveness. Through various research reports and survey instruments, CEP has helped many foundations, including ours, to understand our work better and, we hope, to make us more effective.
This emphasis on data collection is both commendable and necessary. However, we ought to consider what other attributes, often not grounded in data, may contribute to effective philanthropy. Let me propose three attributes that, while not lending themselves to easy measurement and far more subjective , strike me as vital to the success of any philanthropic enterprise: listening, synthesizing, and sharing.
Listening: Because of the resources at our disposal, we can meet with just about anyone we’d like to and obtain about any knowledge that is available. This access provides us with a unique platform for learning, but it also requires us to be active and authentic listeners. The power dynamic inherent to philanthropy makes it critical that we resist the temptation to talk more than listen, precisely because people will always listen politely to anything we have to say, regardless of its utility.
Jim is Irvine’s CEO. A native Californian, he is passionate about the Foundation
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Apr 01, 2011
Dear Friends,
Acknowledging and discussing failure in philanthropy — and the learning that can come from it — has been a central subject of numerous recent articles and case studies. Warren Buffett has even weighed in, suggesting that philanthropies that do not fail are likely “taking on things that are too easy.” There is much more to say about this subject, but I want to focus in this quarterly letter on one common theme that emerged from my reading of these reports and analyses about failure.
Not surprisingly, because foundations can tend to be insulated, one of the common lessons about philanthropic failure is that foundations must do more to listen to and to learn from their grantees and stakeholders. In examining the foundation initiatives that have been profiled as failures (including our own report on an after-school initiative), one key takeaway is that the feedback loops were not as robust as they could have been. Foundations simply did not do enough to listen and learn, and their partners often felt they could not come forward with criticism or bad news. Either way, as a philanthropic sector, we have much more work to do in this regard.
This issue has been on my mind as we prepare to share publicly the results of Irvine’s most recent Grantee Perception Report, conducted for us in the latter part of 2010 by the Center for Effective Philanthropy. We, and others in philanthropy, have used this survey tool to gather confidential, anonymous feedback from our grantees, with the ability to compare how our grantees perceive their work with Irvine to their work with other foundations. We have found the data from these surveys to be immensely valuable. As we did in 2006, we are not only posting on our website the full 2010 Grantee Perception Report, but we are also describing what we have learned from this feedback and how we intend to address areas where our performance as a foundation can improve. To that end, I invite you to watch a three-minute audio slide show narrated by our Vice President for Programs, Joe Pon.
A native Californian, Daniel Silverman leads the Foundation’s communications wor
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Apr 01, 2011
In 2010, as part of our regular process of gathering formal and informal feedback about perceptions of Irvine and our work, we commissioned a Grantee Perception Report (GPR) from the Center for Effective Philanthropy. The GPR provides comparative, anonymous feedback from our grantees, giving us a candid assessment of our work that we might not otherwise receive. We invite you to view the following three-minute audio slide show for a brief overview of what we learned from our grantees and what we are doing about it:
For more about the report, we invite you to read the following:
In addition to sharing these results with you, we are interested in learning from you and benefitting from your reflections and suggestions. Therefore, we have created a way for you to comment on this page. We appreciate any feedback from you and we thank you for your interest in the work of the Irvine Foundation.
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Jul 31, 2011
