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April 2007
Report Reveals Hard Lessons about Philanthropy
While the Neighborhood Improvement Initiative certainly
provided community benefits, overall the program fell short
of expectations.
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 Improvement Initiative,” explores various missteps as the Foundation attempted an ambitious plan to reduce poverty and develop new community leaders in East Palo Alto, San Jose, and west Oakland neighborhoods. While the effort did score some successes, it fell far short of the Foundation’s goal of broad, deep, and sustained change in the three communities, Foundation officials and the report’s authors agreed.
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Bringing Arts Education to the Students
 The California Alliance for Arts Education advocates for
quality arts education for all students.
(Photo courtesy of CAAE)
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 to believe that goal was in reach. Recently, a member of the Alliance had the opportunity to witness one California community, Stockton, seize the opportunity that the new funding offers.
It’s 5:00 p.m. on a cold Wednesday evening in early December. It’s reasonable to assume that most folks on the road in the Central Valley city of Stockton are headed home to a warm meal after a hard day’s work. But not the members of Stockton Unified's arts education team, who are rapidly filling the meeting room at St. Mark’s Plaza.
Look around the room and you see the faces of roughly fifty teachers, parents, community arts workers, school administrators, and tonight, even the new superintendent of the Stockton school district, Dr. Jack McLaughlin.
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“Foundations”
A Q&A about Global Trade with Ann Tutwiler
Ann Tutwiler
“Foundations” is an occasional series of informal question-and-answer sessions with employees of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to let them explain their work. Ann Tutwiler is a Program Officer and the Managing Director for Trade and Development with the Foundation’s Global Development Program. In that capacity, she works to reform international trade. Trade reform has greater potential to improve the lives of the world’s poor than all international aid efforts. And the key to reform is the current round of international trade talks known as the Doha Round.
Unfortunately, as these talks have entered their final phases, common ground has become harder to find. In February, the Hewlett Foundation, in partnership with the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Salzburg Seminar, took the unusual step of convening a retreat in Salzburg, Austria, gathering policymakers and others in positions to influence the trade negotiators in hopes of finding ways to move the talks forward. Here, Tutwiler talks about the international trade talks and the recent retreat.
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Houston Hosts Open Educational Resource Meeting
 John Seely Brown, visiting scholar at USC
and former Chief Scientist at Xerox Corporation, speaks to the conference on Open Educational
Resources.
(Photo courtesy of Dan Atkins)
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 movement, as the effort is known, was discussion of the role cell phones are expected to play in the next five years in bringing educational materials to people in the developing world.
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The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
2121 Sand Hill Road
Menlo Park, CA 94025
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