When Martha Ryan returned from working as a nurse in refugee camps in Uganda and Somalia, she was shocked by the poverty she found here in the United States — especially that hundreds of pregnant women and children were living on the streets. This led her to start the Homeless Prenatal Program, which transforms the lives of homeless mothers in San Francisco. Ryan, who received a Leadership Award in 2011, was recently featured as a Change Agent by The Bay Citizen.

Here is an excerpt of the article:

“Solar power didn’t just save me money — it saved my life,” says U.S. Navy veteran Elmer Rankin, referring to the solar panels paid for by a California subsidy and installed on his rooftop by GRID Alternatives. Founded by 2010 Leadership Award recipients Erica Mackie and Tim Sears, GRID Alternatives has been helping tens of thousands of low-income California residents like Rankin reduce electricity costs and greenhouse gas emissions, while training thousands of workers in solar installation.

In a recent San Francisco Chronicle op-ed article, UC Berkeley professor and renewable energy expert Daniel Kammen makes the case that policymakers should expand models like GRID Alternatives to help even more people. Here is an excerpt from Kammen’s op-ed:

Earlier this month, I was part of an event in Napa County that shows why a creative and resourced community foundation is one of the most important assets a community can have. More than 150 civic leaders, business people, teachers and community members attended a gathering hosted by the Napa Valley Community Foundation to talk about immigration and look at a new report the community foundation commissioned that examines the fiscal and economic impact of immigrants in the region.

To most of us, Napa Valley brings to mind wine and tourism; and indeed, those are two of the most important industries in the county. But because the Irvine Foundation seeks to expand opportunity for disadvantaged Californians, I also think of changing demographics when I think of Napa County.

Napa will experience one of the most profound demographic shifts in the state over the next 40 years. The Latino population is estimated to grow from 23 percent to 70 percent of residents by 2050, and Napa will become the first county in the Bay Area to have a Latino majority. How the community handles these shifting demographics will be critical to the county’s economy and quality of life. Will the community welcome this increased diversity or will it become a source of division? Will public schools be able to close the achievement gap between Caucasian students and students of color, or will inequalities become exacerbated?

While a number of individual foundations have long focused on assessing the impact of their grants, in recent years the field of philanthropy as a whole has become more interested in this challenging aspect of foundation work. In that context, we were glad to contribute an article in the current issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), as part of a special supplement sponsored by the Aspen Institute Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation on “Advancing Evaluation Practices in Philanthropy.” The supplement includes a variety of perspectives on this important and complex subject.

In the article, my colleague Kevin Rafter and I describe our approach to assessing Irvine’s performance using a framework we developed in collaboration with our board of directors eight years ago. The framework provides a method to evaluate our impact across the Foundation, focusing in large part on our programmatic work but also acknowledging that there are other ways to assess the Foundation’s performance. Our SSIR article discusses the lessons we have learned from our foundation-wide approach to performance assessment, and the challenges we continue to face in doing this work.

On February 13, Matthew Cate, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, presented a James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award to Christa Gannon, founder and director of Fresh Lifelines for Youth (FLY), a program that has been reducing juvenile crime in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties by giving local youth leadership training and classes in criminal justice.

Recently, Cate spoke to Irvine Senior Program Officer Catherine Hazelton about the effectiveness of the FLY approach and how the pending realignment of most juvenile justice programs from state to county control may allow for greater emphasis on crime prevention programs.

In response to high-profile cases of harassment and deaths of LGBT youths, many school-safety advocates have demanded "zero tolerance" for bullies. But Carolyn Laub, founder and executive director of Gay-Straight Alliance Network and the recipient of a 2012 Leadership Award, writes in The Huffington Post about why this is the wrong approach and offers a better way.

Here is an excerpt of her article in The Huffington Post:

Social justice organizing is a complex undertaking every step of the way. And as we look back at victories, figuring out which factors contributed to success can be difficult. So, I and many others welcomed the clear, succinct and compelling account of two decades of organizing in Los Angeles after the 1992 civil unrest recently published by the University of Southern California Program for Environmental & Regional Equity and Liberty Hill Foundation.

Their report, “L.A. Rising: The 1992 Civic Unrest, the Arc of Social Justice Organizing, and the Lessons for Today’s Movement Building,” captures how organizing strategies and institutions evolved during these decades, and distills ten innovative elements of the organizing approaches that were critical to their success. While these elements emerge from the realities of Los Angeles, they certainly can be applied to today’s public engagement efforts in the Central Valley, Inland Empire and elsewhere in California. I also was gratified to see that the authors shared implications for funders of social justice organizing, identifying practices that best sustain the ongoing involvement of residents in shaping their communities.