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.

The Milken Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Los Angeles, is known for its annual conferences about California. Every year, the institute has brought together influential leaders to examine the range of opportunities and challenges facing the state. Irvine was a sponsor of this year’s conference.

At the all-day event held earlier this month, after sessions on a range of issues – including education, energy and the state’s finances – the focus of the conference turned to leadership. In a panel discussion moderated by Irvine President and CEO Jim Canales, several California leaders from the business, nonprofit and educational sectors offered their thoughts about what inspires them about California today and how leaders can build and shape investments in its future.

There’s only one week left before the December 3 deadline to apply to our Exploring Engagement Fund, and we are looking forward to reviewing the creative proposals that many arts nonprofits will submit. As we’ve noted before, this is the only opportunity to apply to the Exploring Engagement Fund until December 2013, so we hope you'll consider applying this year. For those of you that are still working on applications or thinking about applying, we strongly encourage you to review the guidelines for applying to the fund and watch two videos of our grantees describing their Exploring Engagement Fund grants.

Grants from the Exploring Engagement Fund support nonprofit organizations as they investigate new and enriching ways to engage Californians in the arts. Irvine's new Arts program strategy seeks to promote engagement in the arts for all Californians, and the Exploring Engagement Fund is one of three new funds offered to date under the new strategy. The three funds are:

On November 11, The Washington Post ran a collection of five pieces by leaders in the nonprofit arts sector touching on issues raised by the current plight of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Long a premier cultural institution in Washington – located across the street from the White House – the Corcoran is struggling to forge a sustainable future. Irvine President and CEO Jim Canales was among the leaders invited to share their views; he wrote about the importance of a constructive partnership between an organization’s chief executive and its board. His contribution is reprinted here:

Having served on and chaired many nonprofit boards, as well as having been chief executive of a large foundation for nine years, I know that when partnerships between a nonprofit’s board and its chief executive work well, they create the conditions for high performance. A constructive partnership:

I described in my last letter some of the institutional planning work underway at the Irvine Foundation this year. Related to that effort, and as part of our continuing commitment to learning from the Foundation’s various stakeholders, we conducted a stakeholder assessment survey to receive feedback about our work. I am using this quarter’s letter to share more about this survey as well as what we learned from it.

In-depth, confidential interviews were conducted by a third-party consultant with more than 60 leaders in our fields of work, the nonprofit community in general, and philanthropy. The interview questions focused on awareness and perceptions of the Irvine Foundation; the perceived impact of our work, broadly and in our program areas; and feedback on direct experience and interactions with the Foundation. We also asked questions about the challenges and opportunities facing California.

As a grantmaker, I get the opportunity to hear about how organizations are tackling some of the most pressing issues facing youth in our state. One of the events that I look forward to most is the annual Grantmakers for Education conference, because it gives me the chance to learn how other funders are thinking about systemic education reform, and highlights some promising practices taking place across the nation. This year’s conference brought together nearly 500 education grantmakers in New York City for keynote speeches, site visits and panel discussions. This format may sound similar to other conferences you have attended, but what do 500 education grantmakers actually talk about when they come together?

The hot issues at the conference are probably not surprising to anyone who follows education reform. College and career readiness, the Common Core State Standards, STEM, better use of data, collaboration, district-level reform and digital learning were all topics that had a lot of buzz. I was especially interested in a session on “College and Career Readiness: What Do We Mean?” that was moderated by former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education. The session featured an engaging trio of panelists including Nader Twal from Long Beach Unified School District, JD Hoye from the National Academy Foundation (NAF) and NAF alumnus Michael Durant. Frameworks developed by both NAF and ConnectEd were presented to describe what it means to be ready for both college and career.

What I found to be most encouraging, though, is that all the big issues being discussed at the conference — including college and career readiness — tied incredibly well to what we’re doing collectively as a Linked Learning field. For example, sessions on the Common Core were packed, and seeing that level of interest continued to reinforce that Linked Learning is ideally positioned to be a central way districts deliver the Common Core standards.