The California Alliance for Arts Education, a Hewlett Foundation grant recipient, has worked for more than three decades to bring arts education to every student in the state’s schools. Until recently, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2006 commitment of $105 million for arts education and the promise of more to come, there had been little reason …
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has commissioned and made public a report that critiques a largely unsuccessful, ten-year, $20 million-plus effort that it undertook to improve the lives of residents in three disadvantaged neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area. The sixty-four-page report, entitled “Hard Lessons about Philanthropy and Community Change from the Neighborhood …
More than a hundred educators, technologists, and academics working to improve educational materials available on the Internet gathered at Rice University in Houston last month to assess the Hewlett Foundation’s contributions in this field and discuss new directions for their work. Among the highlights of this gathering of people working in the Open Educational Resources …
MENLO PARK, Calif. – In 1996, the Hewlett Foundation embarked upon an ambitious, multiyear, multimillion dollar initiative designed to improve the lives of residents in three disadvantaged neighborhoods in the Bay Area. Ten years and $20 million later, the Neighborhood Improvement Initiative, as it came to be known, is an acknowledged disappointment. While the initiative …
MENLO PARK and SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation are pleased to announce its 2007 Emerging Composers Awards Program. The foundations will provide up to six grants of $50,000 each to nonprofit San Francisco Bay Area music and music presenting organizations, for the commission and …
California schools are in need of sweeping, comprehensive reforms if the state is to raise the quality of education and student-achievement rates, according to a long-awaited research project that rigorously assesses how K-12 schools are governed and financed. The structural problems are so deep-seated that more funding and small, incremental interventions are unlikely to make …
Throughout the ten years that Chastain Fitzgerald traveled in Africa, no matter how remote the village, there was one constant. If she asked enough people, she could find the villager who sold some combination of goods-matches, chewing gum, flour- and always, always, Coca-Cola. The fact that the Coca-Cola Company gets its product to these far-flung …
MENLO PARK, Calif. – A landmark study from independent research institute SRI International, for the first time systemically examining the status of arts education in California, reveals that the vast majority of California’s schools fail to meet state standards for teaching the arts, and that access to arts instruction varies widely among the state’s schools. …
“Foundations” is an occasional series of informal question and answers sessions with employees of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to let them explain their work. Kristi Kimball is a program officer who manages a wide range of grants designed to improve educational policy in California. Currently, the Foundation, with several partners (the Gates, Irvine …
In a land of thousand-year-old cedar trees and wolf packs that have never gazed upon humans, the Tsimshian people of British Columbia’s north coast tell the story of the spirit bear, a rare white bear that roams among its more common black brethren. In the Tsimshian’s telling, Raven, the creator, transformed every tenth black bear …