For the past three years, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation has been researching how best to utilize its resources to afford the most value to our three giving areas: Health, Education and the Arts. Since our launch in 2008, we have endeavored to fund inspiring and world-changing work. Our founder was very concerned with a number of areas, including most notably the state of education in America, support for the performing arts, and advancing medical research to improve treatment options for those with chronic disease. The Foundation focuses its efforts on the San Francisco Bay Area and specific medical issues to honor Mr. Rainin’s wishes.

As a new and evolving Foundation, we strive to continually evaluate our approaches and learn from our choices. Some of the funding decisions we made in the past may not reflect our thinking going forward. Because of this, someone visiting our site and reviewing our list of past grantees to determine our thinking may not get an accurate sense of the direction we are headed. As we continue to refine our measurement and evaluation tools to determine the effectiveness of our funding decisions, our list of grantees will begin to reflect our priorities more accurately.

HEALTH

Our health grants are currently focused solely on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), an affliction that has profoundly impacted the Rainin family. Through interviews with our Scientific Advisory Board, we determined that there is a need to support projects that, due to their innovative nature, may not be eligible for funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or other more traditional sources. Keeping in mind Mr. Rainin’s knack for connecting individuals from different disciplines to come up with innovative solutions to problems, we created our first health grants, the Kenneth Rainin Innovator Awards Program for IBD Research. With this program, we are reaching out to researchers from all scientific disciplines and encouraging collaboration in the hope of finding new and better treatments and ultimately a cure for ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s Disease. The Program’s key components for funding consideration include innovation, collaboration, scientific merit and a high potential for success. In 2010, we granted our first two Innovator Awards. Each grantee was awarded $100,000 for one year to give them the opportunity to conduct their research and show proof of principle. We are now working on creating a “Breakthrough Award” to provide multi-year funding to Innovator Award recipients whose projects are successful so they can move ahead with more substantial studies.

EDUCATION

Our education grants are focused on emergent and early literacy programs in Oakland, California, where our founder lived for many years. The 2010 STAR test results showed that approximately 60% of Oakland’s 3rd graders are reading below proficient level. Many of these children did not have access to quality pre-schools. The Kenneth Rainin Foundation feels strongly that this situation can be dramatically improved through programs that provide the resources and support for one-to-one research-based tutoring during or after school, high quality children’s books to classrooms and families, and read-alouds and literacy in the homes of low-income families in Oakland. We are currently partnering with the Oakland Literacy Coalition and the East Bay Community Foundation to fund the Brookfield Literacy Zone with the goal of determining an effective model for supporting literacy development in the Oakland public schools. In the future, we hope to replicate a successful model throughout Oakland and other Bay Area cities. We are considering funding emergent and early literacy research at a national level in the future.

ARTS

Our founder was particularly passionate about dance, especially the San Francisco Ballet for which he served as Chairman of the Executive Committee. When the Kenneth Rainin Foundation launched, we were surprised to learn that the San Francisco Bay Area has the third largest theater community in the US and is the largest per capita dance center in the nation. It seems the Bay Area performing arts are a well-kept secret. One of our goals is to promote awareness and pride for Bay Area performing arts both locally and nationally.

We were aided in our understanding of the important local dance community and its major current funding needs by a documentary titled Artists in Exile created by local filmmakers Austin Forbord and Shelley Trott of RAPT Productions. It occurred to us that a similar documentary on the history of Bay Area theater would be equally helpful to understand the unique characteristics of our community and what its current funding needs might be, so we commissioned RAPT to create Stage Left. We are thrilled with the results and are looking forward to using Stage Left as a tool to encourage grantmakers to support Bay Area theater and to advance our goal of promoting awareness and pride for our local performing arts.

Almost immediately, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation created a core giving program for dance and theater organizations. Our giving gravitates toward organizations or projects that are not well-funded; cutting edge, innovative or risky projects; outdoor, site-specific and alternative venues; free performances; groups that experiment, challenge and explore; collaborations across artistic disciplines; and programs that support the effectiveness of arts organizations. We are interested in engaging new audiences and supporting the quintessentially Bay Area performing arts organizations that push boundaries and blur lines between theater, dance, performance art, visual art, and media. Our initial grants are program or project-based. We are taking a particular interest in the movement to develop San Francisco’s mid-Market district into an arts corridor. We are creating an additional grant program for previous grantees to fund capital requests for performance and rehearsal space and to provide specific operating support. We are also developing a capacity building program to create sustainable infrastructure for small and mid-size organizations that we hope to launch in 2014.

In the spirit of collaboration and in an attempt to leverage assets, the Foundation partnered with the San Francisco Film Society to create a grant program to support Bay Area filmmakers in the production of narrative features with social justice themes. The SFFS is uniquely positioned to support grantees through the process of fundraising, production and distribution.

FINAL WORDS

Despite the current economic climate, we’ve learned there are amazing opportunities to be nurtured and an expansive network of organizations working to enrich and support each of our giving areas. We will do our best to contribute to those efforts and to collaborate with like-minded organizations to strengthen and energize those communities. One of the most rewarding aspects of our work thus far has been talking directly with medical researchers, literacy service providers and artists to learn as much as we can from those engaged in the work. We plan to continue those conversations to pursue an environment that supports innovation, collaboration and connection.