A culture clash is coming to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and they wouldn't have it any other way.

The nation's largest orchestra is planning an ambitious series of performances that will blend contemporary orchestral music with other art forms that include film, jazz, spoken word, pop, dance, and hip-hop over three seasons starting in 2008. The hope is that these efforts will engage concert-goers in a variety of ways and draw an entirely new audience to a traditional genre of music.

"We believe this is an exciting experiment," said Irvine Arts Program Director John McGuirk. "Each innovation is truly relevant to the organizations and may serve as a model for specific artistic disciplines or for the broader arts field."

Across the country, orchestras are facing a common problem: how to cultivate a younger, modern crowd without alienating an established audience and still compete in a dynamic cultural landscape. The L.A. Philharmonic's Seasonal Platforms series offers an innovative answer to that question that could serve as a model for future classical music programming.

It is the kind of experiment that The James Irvine Foundation seeks to support through its Artistic Innovation Fund (AIF). The L.A. Philharmonic is one of five premier cultural institutions in California that together received more than $3.8 million in June as part of the second round of AIF funding. They join seven other arts institutions that received grants last year during the initiative's first year.

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Tulare County, in the San Joaquin Valley, is a place most Californians pass by without much reflection on the drive between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Sprawling over the flatlands and foothills east of Highway 5, it claims the title of the world's center of milk production. Until recently, the county's 400,000 dairy cows outnumbered its humans.

Tulare's 300 dairies produce wealth for some, but not for the majority of its residents, more than half of whom are Latino. Four in ten local adults never graduated high school. According to the 2000 U.S. census, Tulare has the highest poverty rate of any county in the state.

"When local residents are not at the public meetings, nobody speaks to their issues. But when they're present, they can speak for themselves, and have a greater chance of sharing in Tulare County's future prosperity," said Caroline Farrell, managing attorney in the Delano office of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment.

Residents often must endure unhealthy air. The San Joaquin Valley has the state's worst smog, and particle pollution from the dairies is likely a factor in Tulare residents' exceptionally high rates of asthma. Schoolchildren have become ill from pesticides sprayed on fields close to their classrooms. On summer days, when temperatures commonly exceed 110 degrees, dust from the traffic on unpaved roadsides fills the air.

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Preparing the next generation of leaders is an important challenge for any community, but for the black clergy in Los Angeles, the stakes seemed particularly high a few years ago.

Since the civil rights era, the church has been at the center of community and civic life for African Americans, serving as a base for the struggle against oppression and inequity. In Los Angeles, in particular, the black church has been a leader on social issues. It has promoted the economic development of low-income neighborhoods and helped to heal the city in the wake of the 1992 civil unrest.

This effort is important because the essence of the struggle for black equity has always been based in the black church, said the Rev. Cecil Murray, who directs the Passing the Mantle program at USCs Center for Religion and Civic Culture.

A number of black clergy have emerged as community leaders in Los Angeles, but few better exemplify this tradition of leadership than Rev. Cecil Murray, who until recently presided over the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Los Angeles. During his 27 years there, he grew its tiny congregation of 250 into a major community force with more than 18,000 members.

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Although arts organizations throughout California face an array of challenges on many fronts, those challenges can be viewed as great opportunities to adapt and innovate. So says John McGuirk, the new Arts Program Director at The James Irvine Foundation.

McGuirk joined Irvine in October and brings more than 15 years of substantive experience with arts organization and in arts philanthropy. McGuirk has worked as a Program Officer for Performing Arts at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and as the Director of Grants Programs for Arts Council Silicon Valley. He also worked for seven years at the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View, and held positions at both the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Opera. A graduate of Grove City College, McGuirk earned his masters degree in public management at Carnegie Mellon University, with a concentration in arts management.

"Despite the critical issues facing the nonprofit arts sector, I remain optimistic," said John McGuirk, Arts Program Director for the James Irvine Foundation. "We have many opportunities to innovate and adapt. California will continue to be one of the most dynamic and generative environments for arts and culture in the nation and in the world."

He recently sat down with Irvine Quarterly to discuss his views on the importance of arts within California and how his background as an artist helped steer him to his current position at Irvine.

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Last January's sub-freezing temperatures caused more than $1.4 billion in damages to Californias oranges, lemons, avocados and other signature crops. It was a disaster for many farmers and resulted in higher prices for consumers. But it has also become a broader human emergency.

Tens of thousands of farmworkers, packers and truck drivers — who play an integral role in the success of California agriculture — now face weeks and even months of unemployment because of the freeze. Many have been left without enough money for food, rent or mortgage payments, utilities, and other essentials.

"More than two months after the freeze, we are seeing needs increase, not decrease, in our community," said Mary Panesar, Executive Director of the Desert Community Foundation in Palm Desert. "These grants will provide immediate relief in response to this human crisis by providing much-needed assistance to local farmworkers and their families."

The impact has been hardest among communities in the east San Joaquin Valley, the heart of the state's citrus growing industry. But the effects are also being felt in the Coachella Valley and the Central Coast, and among workers who tend a range of crops, including strawberries, lettuce, artichokes, and others.

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California leaders in education, business, labor, and government came together for an historic summit meeting in March to strategize about how career and technical education can help transform Californias high schools and maintain the states competitive edge in the global economy.

The summit, held in a cavernous sheet-metal manufacturing plant in Torrance, was called by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has made career and technical education (CTE) a centerpiece of his education policy agenda. He challenged the more than 100 people in attendance to use the event as a launching pad for an ambitious effort to expand CTE across the state.

"Irvine is strongly committed to CTE reforms essential for California's children," said Anne Stanton, the Foundation's Youth Program Director. "We look forward to working with the Governor, the Legislature, and other key public policy leaders on helping shape this issue critical for the future of our state."

"This summit is, of course, the beginning. It will open up the dialogue," said Gov. Schwarzenegger, who himself is a product of career and technical education in his native Austria. "I'm looking forward to hearing all the different proposals so we can create a long-term blueprint, and really move forward and expand career tech education."

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Why vote? It may be democracy's most fundamental act, but voting rates are distressingly low in many California communities. To turn the tide, a number of grassroots groups are mobilizing people to vote using a simple yet powerful recipe: one part education, one part mobilization.

The groups are participating in the California Votes Initiative (CVI), a project of The James Irvine Foundation aimed at increasing voter participation rates among infrequent voters — particularly those in low-income and ethnic communities — in several regions in the state. Beyond the more concrete goal of generating higher voting rates, the Foundation is seeking to shed light on effective strategies for increasing voter turnout. What methods lead citizens to the ballot box?

California's voting rates are distressingly low, particularly in low-income and ethnic communities. Participants in the California Votes Initiative are working to change that, through education and mobilization.

For community organizers, the importance of low-income and ethnic communities participating in elections has become clearer than ever.

“When I started organizing in the early 1990s, if you could get enough people to show interest, you could move an issue forward,” says Corey Timpson, Director of Inland Congregations United for Change, a CVI participant and affiliate of the Pacific Institute for Community Organization, a network of congregation-based community organizations in the state. “But over the last decade there's been a distinct shift. When we bring people to speak out at public meetings, public officials now ask, ‘How many of you vote?’ There's the implication that if you don't vote, you won't have influence.”

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Once the pride of the state, and a model emulated nationwide, California's public education system has been gaining a different kind of notoriety since the 1970s. California students now rank among the lowest nationwide in math and reading achievement, across all racial and ethnic groups. A recent study by Harvard University's Civil Rights Project, supported by an Irvine grant, found that only 69 percent of California's students graduate from high school on time, with only 55 percent of African American and 57 percent of Latino students getting diplomas in four years.

California schools are failing despite statewide curriculum standards that are among the most rigorous in the country. Furthermore, the state has implemented a series of large-scale reform measures to attempt to fix its schools, including comprehensive school finance reform, the enactment of charter school legislation in 1992, and the program to reduce class sizes enacted in 1996.

How can California make best use of its education dollars to ensure it provides every child with a high-quality education?

Why isn't it working? According to recent polling conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California (with funding from Irvine), most Californians regard the quality of education in the state as the most important concern to be addressed by the Governor and Legislature in 2006. And even though Governor Schwarzenegger's proposed budget for 2006–2007 once again increased K–12 education spending — up to more than $40 billion, representing 32 percent of all proposed expenditures the question persists, for both policymakers and the public: how can California make best use of its education dollars to ensure it provides every child with a high-quality education?

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The word "hapa" comes from the Hawaiian "hapa haole," originally a derogatory term meaning "half white". But today "hapa" has been embraced as a term of pride by a wide range of people whose mixed-race ancestry is part Asian or Pacific Islander.

Hapa-ness is spreading through American culture. There are hapa Web sites, hapa social clubs, hapa campus groups, hapa films, and hapa literature. There are well-known hapas, including golfer Tiger Woods, actor Keanu Reeves, musician Sean Lennon, and artist Kip Fulbeck.

"While the community is changing, we view the trend as an opportunity to share our programs with a significantly larger audience," says Irene Y. Hirano, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

For some older cultural institutions, this youthful, iconoclastic focus on everything hapa might be viewed as an unwelcome development, threatening established traditions. But not to the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles, which has embraced the trend wholeheartedly.

The museum recently sponsored a photographic exhibit by Fulbeck, a mixed-media artist who is chair of the UC Santa Barbara art department. Called "kip fulbeck: part asian, 100% hapa," the show captures the extraordinary diversity of mixed-race Asians, and illustrates how the perception of multiracial people has evolved from society's margins to its mainstream.

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With a historic infrastructure bond package and a gubernatorial contest on this Novembers ballot, Californians will face important decisions about the state's future when they go to the polls.

Yet most voters believe the leading candidates, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic challenger Phil Angelides, are not paying enough attention to the issues that matter most to them. And California residents are deeply distrustful of state government's ability to solve their problems over the long term.

"Voters are engaged, are following election and candidate news — yet they are not only uninspired, they are turned off to the point where they may turn away," says Mark Baldessare, Survey Director for the Public Policy Institute of California.

Those were some of the more revealing findings from a series of statewide surveys that the Public Policy Institute of California is conducting this fall with a $300,000 grant from The James Irvine Foundation. The series includes three surveys in the months leading up to the Nov. 7 election and one post-election survey immediately following the election.

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