Irvine’s Board of Directors approved more than $20 million in grants at its quarterly meeting last week. Of the 36 grants approved, 22 in the Arts, nine in California Democracy two in Youth, and one in Special Initiatives. In addition, two Special Opportunities grants were approved. Here are a few grants that we’re particularly excited about:

Exploring Engagement Fund — The grants include the first round under our Exploring Engagement Fund which demonstrates Irvine’s new Arts program strategy in action. 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. Grants total more than $2 million to 20 arts organizations who are piloting new ideas to engage Californians in the arts.

Families in Schools — A $5.15 million grant was made to continue our Families in Education Initiative, which seeks to engage parents in educational decision making and advance new educational policies and practices in the San Joaquin Valley and Inland Empire. The initiative supports 11 community organizations in those regions and is administered by Los Angeles-based Families in Schools, which provides advice and technical assistance and strategizes with Irvine about how to maximize the initiative’s impact. This grant is part of the California Democracy program, which seeks to advance effective public policy decision making that is reflective of and responsive to all Californians.

ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career — Our Youth program promotes Linked Learning as a new approach to high school education that combines strong academics with real-world experience in a wide range of fields. This $5.725 million grant includes continued funding and substantial support to ConnectEd to serve as the intermediary organization managing the California Linked Learning District Initiative and to provide technical assistance to all nine districts for one additional year. This grant is part of the program’s Linked Learning Practice priority. Grants made as part of Irvine’s Youth program seek to increase the number of low income youth in California who complete high school on time and attain a postsecondary credential by the age of 25.

A new wave of creative placemaking is underway as part of ArtPlace, an innovative partnership model of foundations, corporations and government agencies that supports community building through the arts. Irvine is pleased to support this unique program for the second year in a row, having contributed $2 million to ArtPlace to support California-based projects among those supported nationally by the initiative.

ArtPlace was created in 2010 as a partnership among 11 foundations, six banks and eight federal agencies (including the National Endowment for the Arts) to transform urban and rural communities throughout the country by using the arts as an economic driver. To date, the initiative has raised more than $50 million in support of the various projects. The most recent cycle of grants, announced Monday, provides $15.4 million in support of 47 projects that were chosen out of more than 2,200 letters of inquiry. Six of those 47 projects will take place in California.

The approach being taken by ArtPlace, known as “creative placemaking,” has emerged over the past 20 years as a promising way to increase the vitality of communities and help them grow. Irvine is pleased to support this partnership because of ArtPlace’s resonance with our belief that the arts create meaningful ongoing “bridging and bonding” connections among Californians, fostering a vibrant, inclusive society. In 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts built on its two decades of work in creative placemaking by announcing the first grants in its new Our Town program, designed to support public-private partnerships to strengthen the arts while energizing the overall community. ArtPlace takes this movement a step further, as the first major public-private partnership to encourage creative placemaking across America.

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.