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
Dear Friends,Here are four views of California from the national media, just in the past month:“Far from presiding over a Greek-style crisis, Gov. Jerry Brown is proclaiming a comeback.”Paul Krugman column, The New York Times, March 31“You can laugh
I am pleased to share two exciting developments for us at The James Irvine Foundation.First, effective today, we relocated our San Francisco headquarters to a new home in downtown San Francisco. We have moved across the street from our former locati
As Communications Officer, Ray Delgado oversees various communications initiativ
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Sep 21, 2011
Avid Participation, Abundant Arts Organizations and Dramatic Regional Differences are Hallmarks of the State
San Francisco — California has 11,000 arts and culture nonprofits, a number that places the state ahead of most nations in the world. Californians are more likely to participate than other Americans — but arts involvement and nonprofit organizations are unevenly spread across California’s geographic and demographic communities.
New findings generated by Markusen Economic Research and commissioned by The James Irvine Foundation offer fresh illustrations of the California nonprofit arts sector and the people who take part in it. Released today, Arts, Culture and Californians draws highlights from the research.
This new research illustrates that arts and culture plays a significant role in the daily lives of Californians. The state is noteworthy for the avid participation of its people, the diversity and abundance of its arts organizations and the varied regional characteristics of its arts sector. California’s regions reflect distinctive populations, participation rates, numbers and types of arts and culture organizations, and levels of arts funding.
As Communications Officer, Ray Delgado oversees various communications initiativ
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Sep 15, 2011
Groups Receive $2 Million in Investments from Widely Influential Private-Public Collaboration to Revitalize America's Cities and Towns
San Francisco– In an innovative development that is affecting the Bay Area as well as some two dozen other cities and towns across the nation, five leading arts organizations have received more than $2 million in grants from an unprecedented new private-public collaboration, ArtPlace (www.artplaceamerica.org).
Announced for the first time on September 15, ArtPlace is an initiative of 11 of America’s top foundations working in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts and seven federal agencies. Its aim is to drive revitalization across the country by putting the arts at the center of economic development. ArtPlace has now announced its first round of grants, investing $11.5 million in 34 locally initiated projects in cities from Honolulu to Miami. Each project supported by ArtPlace has been selected for developing a new model of helping towns and cities thrive by strategically integrating artists and arts organizations into key local efforts in transportation, housing, community development, job creation and more.
Among the groups funded in the Bay Area are San Francisco-based Intersection for the Arts ($777,000) and the Creative Work Fund ($183,000); the San Jose-based ZER01: The Art & Technology Network ($500,000) and 1st ACT Silicon Valley ($500,000); and the Berkeley-based Berkeley Repertory Theatre ($750,000).
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.
A native Californian, Daniel Silverman leads the Foundation’s communications wor
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Jul 01, 2011
This article first appeared in Education Week, June 9, 2011. Reprinted with permission from Editorial Projects in Education.
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.
A few hallways away, teenagers master the high-tech tools of the performing arts world. Aspiring musicians sit at rows of electric pianos, listening through headsets to the music they create as it is automatically notated on computer screens. At another school, students juggle computers and soundboards to produce a morning broadcast.
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.
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 Arts Program Director, Josephine is leading the implementation of a new grant
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Jul 01, 2011
Beginning next year, Irvine will evolve its approach to supporting the arts in California. Our new strategy is designed to help arts organizations adapt and thrive amid major demographic and technological shifts affecting the sector. Watch the video below for an introduction to our new Arts program grantmaking strategy.
The Foundation remains deeply committed to the arts throughout California. We have spent the past year surveying the arts landscape, gathering input from grantees and other experts and reviewing the latest research. It has become clear to us that the arts sector in California is undergoing major shifts, due largely to demographic and technological changes, and that these shifts pose long-term challenges and opportunities to nonprofit arts organizations. Our new grantmaking strategy is designed to help these organizations adapt and thrive.
New Goal
Exploring Engagement Fund
We are pleased to announce the first grantmaking fund under the new strategy, the Exploring Engagement Fund, an open competitive fund for California-based nonprofit arts organizations that have an annual operating budget between $100,000 and $5 million. Please read more about the application process,eligibility requirements and frequently asked questions. Additionally, you can watch a webinar that we held for our grantees and grantseekers about the fund on Nov. 7, 2011.
Our new goal 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.
Our principal partners for achieving this will be arts organizations. We will support new and current grantee partners who want to increase their ability to engage Californians in the arts. Specifically, we seek to increase arts engagement in three ways:
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.
