You can’t just read an engineering textbook and expect to go out and build a bridge. And if you’ve never studied French, the odds are that having a French dictionary won’t help much when you ask for directions in Paris. If access to information were all it took to be educated, we wouldn’t need universities, …

You might call Radio Bilingüe a Latino National Public Radio for California’s Central Valley. Growing from a single non-profit station in Fresno in 1976, it today comprises a network of six stations that serve agricultural communities across California and reaches throughout the nation with scores of affiliates. Radio Bilingüe’s mission is to provide critical information …

“Foundations” is an occasional series of informal question-and-answer sessions with employees and others affiliated with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to give them an opportunity to explain their work. Marc Vogl is an officer with the Foundation’s Performing Arts Program. Before joining the Foundation, he co-founded the San Francisco sketch comedy group Killing My …

A coalition of ten large California foundations joined with the chairs of the three ethnic legislative caucuses to announce a pathbreaking project designed to strengthen nonprofit organizations serving low-income and minority communities. The foundations will work together over a multi-year period to make grants that provide capacity building support and technical assistance targeted to minority-led and …

Mexico City was long ago written off as among the most polluted places on earth, a metropolis where the act of breathing is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and the World Health Association recently attributed 4,000 deaths a year to pollution. But today, city leaders have taken the first steps to …

Philanthropy works best when its practitioners have places to share their thoughts. One of the livelier ones these days is the Web site Tactical Philanthropy, a blog hosted by Sean Stannard-Stockton, a San Francisco Bay Area financial advisor who also counsels clients on how to be effective philanthropists.  Stannard-Stockton provides both original reporting about the …

“Foundations” is an occasional series of informal question-and-answer sessions with employees and others affiliated with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to give them an opportunity to explain their work. Pamela Burdman, a Program Officer with the Foundation’s Education Program, has primary responsibility for grants related to California’s community colleges. Before joining the Hewlett Foundation, …

San Francisco Ballet is not exactly a start-up when it comes to cultural organizations. With balanced budgets for seventeen consecutive years and a just-concluded $45 million endowment campaign, the Ballet is a well-oiled cultural machine. But that doesn’t mean it has nothing left to learn about running a successful cultural institution, and that’s why the …

A group of Chinese friends travels to the United States in search of an abducted alien. Their quest takes them on a road trip across the country, where they talk to local people for clues to its whereabouts. The fate of the universe may hang in the balance-and you can help. But never mind aliens. …

Developing nations with vast natural resources so often fail to provide for the basic needs of their citizens that economists have given the phenomenon a name: “the resource curse.” While academics debate the reasons why, the nonprofit Revenue Watch Institute is working to do something about it. Revenue Watch, a Hewlett Foundation grantee, has launched …