Arts Education Receives
Major Boost in New State Budget

After several years of deep budget cuts, programs to teach California public school students about the arts finally are getting a lift from the state. The new state budget, signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in June, supplies $105 million in annual funding for arts education and a one-time commitment of $500 million for arts, music, and physical education equipment. But it's just a first step. Improving the availability and quality of arts education for California’s public school children -- and creating arts audiences for the future -- is an emerging priority for the Hewlett Foundation’s Performing Arts Program.  Read more...

Two Local Foundations Merge
and Hewlett Joins With Others to Help

Two venerable Bay Area community foundations recently agreed to merge, creating one of the nation’s largest such foundations, with assets of more than $1.5 billion to serve local communities. The merger of the Peninsula Community Foundation and the Community Foundation Silicon Valley will create the fourth largest community foundation in the country. But for each of the two Bay Area organizations, the question wasn’t simply size, but whether a merger would result in better service to communities. And that’s where the Hewlett Foundation realized it could be a good neighbor. Read more...

Broadening the Reproductive Health Discussion

Culture, income, and age all can be factors in determining whether a person has access to good family planning and reproductive health care. Recognizing this, the Hewlett Foundation’s Population Program recently announced a cluster of grants totaling more than $1 million to organizations whose mission is to broaden the base of support for reproductive rights issues to include women of color, low-income communities, and teenagers. Individual grants ranged from $150,000 to $400,000.  Read more...

“The Education of Shelby Knox,” a film that explores issues of teen pregnancy and sex education through the eyes of a teenager coming of age in conservative Lubbock, Texas, won the Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film & Digital Media at the Council on Foundations’ 2006 annual conference. The documentary, which was directed by Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt, was funded in part by a grant from the Hewlett Foundation. Read more...

                       Hewlett Foundation in the News

Hewlett Foundation staff has recently been weighing in on some important issues, including international trade, arts education, the collection of student data by the California Department of Education, and the implications for the field of philanthropy of Warren Buffett’s gift to the Gates Foundation. The following are excerpts from articles that appeared in the New York Times, the Sacramento Bee, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy.  Read more...