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December 2007 / January 2008
Citizen-to-Citizen Diplomacy – One Broadcast at a Time
 In the documentary Please Vote for Me, Chinese students Cheng Cheng, Xiaofei Xu,
and Luo Lei stand before their peers during a classroom election
(Photo Courtesy of Jifeng Guo / ITVS)We may live in a global village, but most people’s knowledge of other cultures remains woefully slight. With commercial media more interested in selling products than in informing citizens, realistic depictions of life elsewhere can be surprisingly scarce.
Clearly, in the post-9/11 world, such failures of understanding can have catastrophic consequences. It is to address this problem that the Global Perspectives Project was launched.
The project, to which The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has committed $2 million a year for five years, is working to help produce and distribute foreign documentary films for broadcast in this country, as well as to distribute documentaries about life in America to audiences in other countries. Read more... | | |
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A Changing of the Guard
 At the Community School of Music and Arts, faculty member Mike Morris teaches
jazz to Merit Scholarship student Ken Elmore. The Community School, a Hewlett
grantee, is making a conscious effort to engage youth and to nurture the next
generation of leaders in arts organizations. (Photo courtesy of Community School
of Music and Arts at Finn Center)
Barry Hessenius was worried about leadership.
More specifically, as the former head of the California Arts Council, he was worried about where the next generation of leaders in arts organizations would come from. With baby boomers retiring and fewer workers in the succeeding generation, Hessenius foresaw a fight to recruit new leadership that often-cash-strapped arts organizations would be ill-equipped to wage.
By last spring, Hessenius had transformed his worries into a plan of action with “Involving Youth in Nonprofit Arts Organizations: A Call to Action,” a sixty-two-page study underwritten by the Hewlett Foundation that outlined the problem and proposed some solutions. Read more...
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“Foundations”
A Q&A with Joe Ryan,
Program Officer, Environment
Joe Ryan is a program officer and the managing director for Latin America in the Foundation’s Environment Program. In this position he coordinates all the Foundation’s air quality projects in Mexico and Brazil and also works on the issue in China. In this capacity, Joe works to promote public policy in support of cleaner vehicle fuels, to strengthen transportation regulations, and to increase public transportation in some of the world’s fastest-growing cities.
In the past fifteen years, Joe has lived and worked throughout Latin America, including five years in Brazil working with the Hewlett Foundation. A former Fulbright-Hays doctoral fellow, he has a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Let’s start at the beginning. When did the Environmental Program begin working to promote clean transportation in the developing world, and why did it decide to do so?
We started doing international work in 2002, mainly because we saw an opportunity to leverage foundation resources to improve the lives of people living in the world’s megacities. In most large cities, transportation is responsible for upwards of half of all urban air pollution. By reducing vehicle emissions, you reap benefits that can total billions of dollars annually in reduced healthcare costs. If you’re looking for the biggest social return on your investment, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better place to invest because the culprit—vehicles—is well known, the solutions are there and tested, and the benefits are shared simultaneously by millions of people. Read more... | | |
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Featured Website: GlobalGiving.org
This year, share the good feeling that comes from giving with the person receiving the gift. With the new GlobalGiving gift card the recipient can choose from 450 pre-screened grassroots charity projects around the world and donate the amount you specify on the card with the click of a mouse. The brainchild of a former World Bank official, GlobalGiving is an online marketplace that makes donating to worthy causes too easy to put off. You might be surprised at what $50 or $100 can do in the right places. Better yet, the corn-based card is biodegradable and will break down into environmentally-friendly compounds once it's thrown away.
You can visit GlobalGiving and its gift card program at:
http://www.globalgiving.com/index.html
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The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
2121 Sand Hill Road
Menlo Park, CA 94025
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Last revised: 1/11/2008
