To celebrate Cesar Chavez Day, we’re sharing the story of the School of Arts and Culture at Mexican Heritage Plaza, a grantee of our Performing Arts Program. The plaza sits squarely in San Jose’s Mayfair, a historically Latino neighborhood where Cesar Chavez grew up and where he led the first of the boycotts for farmworker rights …
Marchers including Representative John Lewis, President Barack Obama, and former President George W. Bush on the Edmund Pettus Bridge commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” (Photo Credit: Official White House photo by Lawrence Jackson) There is something very powerful about the way a place weighted with history can change one’s perspective. That’s why, for the past …
Bob Lenz of Envision Schools (a grantee of our Education Program), in an op ed in the San Jose Mercury News, on the “false choice” between skills and college readiness for high school students: Learning to code is cool, but I fear we will be in an either-or situation: learn code or learn academics. Schools like the ones …
Interesting piece at TechCrunch by Ben FitzGerald of the Center for a New American Security (a grantee of our Cyber Initiative), on the importance of collaboration across sectors and disciplines for real cybersecurity: Government outreach efforts often talk about collaboration and working together but usually in a vague, aspirational, kumbaya kind of way. However, for cybersecurity …
Point Lobos State Natural Reserve (Photo Credit: David Seibold, licensed under CC BY NC 2.0) Paul Rogers, writing in the San Jose Mercury News, has a good write-up on a new report from the California Parks Forward Commission, which the Hewlett Foundation supported: California’s venerable state parks—from sunny Los Angeles beaches to towering redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains—are under “serious stress” and …
Rukmini Banerji works on the ASER (Annual Status of Education) initiative, part of Pratham, in India. Experience has shown that simply being in school does not automatically translate into learning for students. As we enter this new phase of global goal setting for education, UNESCO, through its Institute for Statistics, has initiated a very timely …
Nice report from NBC Bay Area’s Joe Rosato, Jr. on last month’s reopening of Boeddeker Park in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. The park’s extensive renovation was made possible by a grant from the Trust for Public Lands, which the Hewlett Foundation supported through our Serving Bay Area Communities grantmaking.
Nice interview at Redstone Strategy Group’s blog with Cathy Casserly, who helped start the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Educational Resources (OER) work, and later served as CEO of Creative Commons, on the past, present and future of OER: What has the OER movement learned over the last 10 years? When we first released an openly-licensed textbook in the …
Nice introduction to the recently relaunched LearnPhilanthropy.org site by Chad Gorski at the Grants Managers Network (GMN) blog: A very enthusiastic staff at Grand Valley State University’s Johnson Center for Philanthropy has recently re-launched LearnPhilanthropy.org (LP) with some dazzling new features. The site’s Philanthropy Ecosystem provides a Directory of 200 organizations that form philanthropy’s infrastructure, research, and networking platforms. LP’s Knowledge Library now holds over 600 learning …