Why we fund open textbooks (and plan to do more)

Textbooks aren’t new or novel, and they certainly don’t represent the cutting edge of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement that the Hewlett Foundation has long supported. But it’s precisely because of the way they are deeply embedded in the education system that they have the potential to shift OER from the exception to the 

An Emergent Approach to Philanthropic Strategy

Madison Initiative Program Officer Kelly Born wrote this piece as a guest post for the Social Velocity blog. It appeared there earlier this week. -Ed. In March of 2014, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation launched a new initiative focused on US democracy reform, The Madison Initiative. The overarching goal is to “help create the conditions in which Congress and 

Developing a System of Micro-credentials:

Teachers earn credentials at the beginning of their careers, but they learn new skills every day. While teachers are recognized for the time they spend in formal professional development settings, they often don’t have the opportunity to demonstrate the full breadth of what they have learned, including in informal contexts. To address this, Digital Promise is building a system 

Women’s economic empowerment: Building on history, experience and learning

Members of the Nairobi (Kenya) Young and Old cooperative group gather in their small center to make products to sell. (Photo Credit: Jonathan Torgovnik/ Reportage by Getty Images, licensed under CC BY NC 4.0) Among the Hewlett Foundation’s oldest, strongest, and most enduring priorities has been to help women gain control over crucial decisions in their 

Three New Homes for Cyber Policy

Last March, our Board approved a new “Cyber Initiative” with a budget of $20 million over five years. The Initiative aims to build a field of policy analysis for problems relating to security and technological trustworthiness on the Internet. While government and industry are both already spending vast sums of money to deal with such 

Assessing Our Strategy for Supporting Regranting Intermediaries

One of the hardest challenges of being an arts grantmaker is deciding how to choose among so many worthy applicants. Even an organization with the Hewlett Foundation’s resources has to make some very hard choices: With more than 2500 arts organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area, our Performing Arts Program can fund only 10% 

The Hewlett Foundation’s Next Phase of Work in International Education:

The Hewlett Foundation has been making grants to improve the quality of education in developing countries since 2006. The Foundation’s special initiative, Quality Education in Developing Countries (“QEDC”), which was co-funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has focused on ensuring that children not only are in school, but are also learning. The end 

Grantmaking Trends Memo: Education 2014

Background During the last ten years, the Education Program has sought to take advantage of key windows of opportunity to advance the education system, as a whole, toward better student outcomes. Anticipating and capitalizing on these windows has been important because education is a conservative field—resistant to anything but incremental change, yet bombarded by reform 

Grantmaking Trends Memo: Environment 2014

This memo provides an analysis of Environment Program grantmaking from 2004 through 2013, with projections for 2014 and 2015, where possible. In Section I, we provide context on the Program’s overall grant making trends. Section II describes the frequency of general operating support (GOS) versus project support grants and some of the reasons for shifts 

Grantmaking Trends Memo: Global Development and Population 2014

Introduction The ten-year picture of Global Development and Population Program grantmaking, including grant type, size, and duration, reflects two factors operating simultaneously in a complex portfolio: the amount of resources available and shifts in strategy. These factors played out during the period from 2004 to 2010, when the work was undertaken within the separate Population 

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