How does a foundation whose charitable mission spans different problems, issue areas, and geographies build a common philosophy to its grantmaking? For the Hewlett Foundation, one part of the answer is in our grant practices – that is, the methods and activities through which grants are executed. These practices include, but are not limited to, …
What are the most important research questions about the impact of social media on political polarization and democracy? How can we support scholarly efforts to answer them? These are among the questions the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ford Foundation discussed with 50 academics, funders, and social media representatives in January 2018. This …
As the school year wraps up, children across California are sitting down for year-end standardized testing. The Golden State is one of 11 that fully participate in the Smarter Balanced assessment consortium, established in 2009 to create higher-quality, comparable tests across the country. As part of our deeper learning grantmaking, the Hewlett Foundation has invested …
A lot has been written about the rural-urban divide in the United States, especially on the heels of the 2016 election. But not enough has yet been written about how rural communities are working harder than ever to sustain their way of life and ensure a vibrant future for the people and places they love …
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation hired M+R in September 2017 to conduct an interview process with 39 individuals representing advocacy organizations, landowners, academics, and Western environmental news reporters. The foundation sought to understand attributes of successful conservation efforts from a rural Western perspective, and what commonalities exist among and across Western communities that advocates …
Increased access to the internet and computing devices by individuals and schools have been instrumental to the growth and institutionalization of the movement toward open educational resources (OER), which are learning materials that can be freely downloaded, edited, and shared. Given that technology choices made by organizations, educational institutions, educators, and students who work with OER …
Just as technology innovations are changing our expectations for educational institutions and teaching and learning writ large, so too are they influencing the course of the OER movement. Increased access to the internet and computing devices by individuals and schools have been instrumental to the growth and institutionalization of the OER movement – and technology …
News coverage of cyber issues has increased in recent years, but many stories focus on the latest breach rather than delving into policy, according to a new study by George Washington University’s Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. The study, commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation, analyzed news coverage from 2014 to 2017 in major …
In 2017, the Hewlett Foundation’s Performing Arts Program asked Education First, a national education strategy and policy consulting firm, to help it take stock of the program’s decade of support for arts education policy and advocacy work at the local, state, and national level. Key questions evaluated by Education First included: What was the original …
The Hewlett Foundation commissioned this report to provide an overview of the current state of the literature on the relationship between social media; political polarization; and political “disinformation,” a term used to encompass a wide range of types of information about politics found online, including “fake news,” rumors, deliberately factually incorrect information, inadvertently factually incorrect …