In October 2012, the following published articles mentioned the work of the Foundation or our grantees:

• Bowers Museum Gets $520,000 Granta
  (Orange County Register, 10/26/12)
• South Coast Repertory Teams with Latino Health Access to Develop Community Latino Theater in Santa Ana
  (Orange County Weekly, 10/24/12)
• Symphony Makes Community Connections
  (San Diego Union-Tribune, 10/19/12)
• Redlands: ArtFest Workshop Offered at County Museum
  (Riverside Press Enterprise, 10/16/12)

The Center for Land-Based Learning recently graduated the first class of 20 students from its six-month California Farm Academy, the latest of Craig McNamara’s innovative efforts to increase the ranks of young farmers in California.

As the 2012 Leadership Award recipient notes, the state must attract more of these young farmers or risk losing valuable agricultural land from production. And fortunately, the center is having little trouble attracting applicants, thanks to “a growing interest among young people in organic farming, farmers markets and the slow-food movement,” according to an article in the Los Angeles Times.

By Karthick Ramakrishnan, University of California, Riverside

As part of our 75th anniversary, Irvine commissioned a series of posts from California experts and thought leaders who discuss the state’s most important trends and how we might collectively respond to them. This is one of those posts and we invite you to check back throughout the fall to read more of these entries and share your reactions below.

California, long viewed as a destination for newcomers from other countries and elsewhere in the United States, is increasingly a state of homegrown residents. It is also a state whose population growth has slowed considerably from the torrid pace of much of the 20th Century. Whether this bodes well or ill for the Golden State remains an open question, one that depends critically on whether economic and social investments will be sufficient to sustain prosperity and wellbeing.

In 2000, California crossed a pivotal threshold, with just over half of the state’s residents born in the Golden State and the remainder born elsewhere in the United States or abroad. Just ten years prior, residents born out of state, including the foreign born, had outnumbered native-born Californians by a ratio of 54 percent to 46 percent. By 2010, that ratio would be reversed, with 46 percent of Californians born outside the Golden State and 54 percent born within.

It’s an exciting time in our Arts program as we begin to see our new arts strategy made real through grantee projects! I wrote about the first statewide Exploring Engagement Fund grants — supporting small- and mid-sized organizations — back in June. Now I am pleased to announce the first grants made as part of our Exploring Engagement Fund for Large Organizations.

Earlier this month our board approved eight grants ranging in size from $520,000 to $600,000 to some of the most prominent arts organizations in California so they can experiment with new ways to engage Californians in the arts. The projects represent a commitment by these arts institutions to establish greater connection to low-income and other Californians underserved by arts nonprofits. We hope the projects spark new ways of thinking about engagement and about how arts nonprofits can adapt to changing demographics and technological changes that the arts field struggles to keep pace with.

Our strategy’s overall vision is about promoting engagement in the arts — specifically the kind of arts engagement that honors our diversity and helps us all to live well together. To accomplish this we aim to build the capacities of responsive, relevant arts nonprofits to adapt to a shifting environment, so that they can better serve and more deeply connect with all Californians. This connection to community should lead to organizational changes that help these arts groups thrive. And the people served by these groups should more strongly recognize the value of the arts as accessible and integral to community life.

By Lisa García Bedolla, Graduate School of Education at Berkeley

As part of our 75th anniversary, Irvine commissioned a series of posts from California experts and thought leaders who discuss the state’s most important trends and how we might collectively respond to them. This is one of those posts and we invite you to check back throughout the fall to read more of these entries and share your reactions below.

With California a majority-minority state, our challenge is finding innovative ways to address persistent racial inequality. A recent UCLA report showed that almost 70 percent of California’s youth are non-white, with no single racial group making up a majority. The report also reveals the stark differences in rates of enrollment in postsecondary education and labor market participation across ethno racial groups, and between males and females within groups. Among immigrant and non-immigrant Latinos, females are 11 percent more likely to enroll in postsecondary education than males, a gap that is echoed across all other ethno racial groups except for Asian/Pacific Islanders. Similarly, almost 30 percent of immigrant Latino and African American youth aged 18–22 are out of school and out of work, compared to 14 percent of white and 8 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander youth. These structural inequalities affect every aspect of our state’s well-being — our income tax base, levels of political participation and the degree to which public policy reflects the needs of all Californians.

One good example of the impact that educational inequality has on all Californians is Latino college-going rates. Latinos are California’s largest ethno racial group, yet have the lowest rates of college completion. Martin Carnoy calls low Latino college graduation rates a "college graduate crisis" that will have detrimental long-term effects on the state’s economy. He points out that even though in 2005–06 almost half of students in California’s public schools were Latino, Latinos made up only about 15 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded by the state’s public and private universities. Patrick Kelly estimates that the lack of college completion among Latinos will, by 2020, result in a two percent decrease in national per capita income. In Latino-heavy California, that effect will be significantly greater, leading to double-digit decreases in per capita income. Since our state’s taxation system depends heavily on income taxes, these changes can be expected to have non-trivial effects on state revenue and service provision. They also will affect the federal tax base. Thus, college completion rates among Latinos have important economic consequences for California and the United States as a whole.

Walk into Vaughn Next Century Learning Center and don't be surprised to hear the mostly Latino students conversing in Mandarin. After all, Vaughn's students are expected to take four years of the Chinese dialect, in addition to mastering English and Spanish, before they graduate.

It is just one of the ways this school in the low-income community of Pacoima, in the San Fernando Valley is defying expectations and preparing its students to thrive in an increasingly global economy.