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.

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.

Dear Friends,

Many ingredients contribute to effective philanthropy, but one of the more important approaches is an authentic commitment to listen and learn from the communities and institutions we support. While we at the Irvine Foundation can certainly do more in this regard — a theme I will turn to later in this letter — I wanted to share some recent activities we have undertaken to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to this approach.

For me, this commitment must start with the governing board. Irvine has built a board that both brings a range of perspectives and experiences to its leadership role and that broadly represents the rich diversity of our state. In addition, for each of the past four years, we have focused one of our quarterly board meetings on opportunities for board members to engage directly with community leaders and to see first hand the work of our partners.

Last year, our board met in Los Angeles, where we explored the challenges and opportunities facing arts organizations in the context of that region’s vibrant arts economy. The previous year we met in Sacramento, where our board heard from our partners in the public policy arena and observed through a site visit the power of the Linked Learning approach to high-school education. And just this year, in early October, we traveled to Fresno, with the goal of deepening the board’s collective understanding of both the challenges and opportunities facing the San Joaquin Valley. This region has been a priority for our funding in recent years based on its rapidly growing population and shifting demographics, a high proportion of low-income residents, and a history of being underserved by traditional philanthropy.