Think globally, trees locally: one of the oaks at the Hewlett Foundation’s offices in Menlo Park, California (Photo Credit: The Hewlett Foundation) Forty-five years ago this week, the first Earth Day was celebrated, during a time when people were just starting to wake up to the environmental hazards that we, as a society, had created …
In an average week, our Global Development and Population Program receives anywhere from one to a dozen inquiries by phone and email. It’s my job to reply to them, and it’s honestly one of my favorite things to do. Many, of course, are from non-profit organizations hoping to start a conversation about funding. Mixed in …
Who will speak? (Photo Credit: Flickr User comedy_nose, licensed under CC BY 2.0) Just for the sake of argument, let’s say there are two kinds of people who advocate for social change: people who are directly affected, aggrieved, involved; and people who are working on behalf of those in that first group. Sarah Brady, for example, worked …
There’s a reason predicting the future is so hard: we humans tend to overestimate the extent to which it will look like the present, only with better gadgets. This point was brought home to me at a recent grantee event, when I had a chance to speak with a member of the House of Representatives, …
You are (not) here: something we try not to lose sight of. (Image Credit: Hewlett Foundation, adapted from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY SA 3.0) In the halls of the Hewlett Foundation, you hear people talking about places: how hard it is for artists to find affordable performance space in the Bay Area; the importance of …
What am I doing for #DeeperLearning? I’m getting a jump start on my summer beach reading. #DLfie pic.twitter.com/th1yBIpgTq — Marc Chun (@HFMarcChun) March 24, 2015 Wednesday morning, Hewlett Foundation Program Officer Marc Chun kicked off a day of Deeper Learning selfie—or #DLfie—sharing with the tweet above, and asked others to share what they were …
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 …
Marc Chun: What do you see as the most significant challenge facing our schools today? Monica Martinez: The ways we teach students are irrelevant to their day-to-day lives and what students need to be able to know and do in the twenty-first century. Our students are waiting for our schools to catch up with their lives. …
Photo Credit: “In the stacks” by Anna Creech, licensed under CC BY NC SA 2.0 We fund a lot of research in the Global Development and Population Program. So we want to be sure that the researchers we’re supporting are using sound methods and reporting accurate findings. We want to contribute to the global public good of new knowledge, …
Mark Schmitt leads the Political Reform Program at the New America Foundation, which is a grantee of the Foundation’s Madison Initiative. He has a thoughtful essay in the current edition of Democracy, entitled “Democratic Romanticism and its Critics,” that everyone interested in democracy reform should read. Schmitt’s piece does a commendably fair job of summarizing the …