Business, school and youth projects focus of Hitachi Foundation learning partnership

Community-based nonprofit organizations from 11 sites gathered in Tucson in early April for the first of three annual institutes sponsored by the Hitachi Foundation as part of its initiative, Work Skills/Life Skills: Preparing The Next Generation.

Foundation Senior Program Officers Renata Hron Gomez and Susan Jenkins lead the effort. The Heartland Center is acting as one of the foundation´s "learning partners." Work Skills/Life Skills focuses on enabling underserved youth to succeed in their adult personal and work lives by building bridges among youth entrepreneurship programs, school-to-career programs and the business world. The Foundation selected these 11 projects from nearly 200 applicants who responded to the request for proposals in 2000. The initiative is designed to deepen one of the strands of the Foundation's Global Corporate Citizenship five-year strategy launched in 1999. A related initiative—Making Work Work: Boosting Retention and Advancement of Low-Wage Workers—will begin later this year.

" This initiative provides a glimpse into the options entrepreneurial activities offer to underserved youth, how business and community goals mesh, how youth development through entrepreneurship programs can serve as a mechanism to broaden school reform, and how disengaged youth can become more engaged in their communities through these processes."

Barbara Dyer, The Hitachi Foundation´s president and CEO

The Hitachi Foundation, based in Washington, DC, develops program initiatives and supports groups of organizations that have goals in common within the focus of each initiative. RFPs define the goals and objectives for initiatives, which are multi-year. The foundation´s grant-making strategy is aimed at enhancing opportunity and quality of life for underserved people. The foundation´s special niche explores the role of business in achieving these societal goals.

According to Barbara Dyer, The Hitachi Foundation´s president and CEO, "We seed business-community partnerships that, in the aggregate, begin to reveal a new social compact. Business and community organizations have an equal stake in achieving results; they share the risk and the rewards and support the places and spaces where ideas and action can flourish. We fund projects that change lives, produce the ideas that challenge the status quo and prove that a better society is within reach."

In the Work Skills/Life Skills initiative, The Hitachi Foundation hopes to address several questions: How does youth entrepreneurship affect the work-life choices of underserved youth? How do we bring businesses, schools and non-profits together in ways that expand and promote the success of underserved youth? What are the tools and skills needed by the partners to develop successful and sustainable programs? How does the Work Skills/Life Skills initiative add to learning and action in the larger field? How does this add to the synergies among the (other) program areas of the foundation?

The projects are located in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, South Carolina and South Dakota.

"This initiative offers us the opportunity to design learning opportunities for underachieving students which will have a sustainable impact on their future education," said Pete Tuana, principal of Fremont Union High School, Sunnyvale, California.

At the Tucson meeting, teams from each of the 11 projects traded information about their project activities, focused on evaluation and strengthening business partnerships, and considered how to apply the ideas and tools gained in Tucson to advance their work back home.

"I gained many things from the Tuscon convening," said Gedaliz Maldonado of Southend Community Service. "I made friends, met possible partners, learned about opportunities to meet and shadow other programs and to learn from and to teach other initiatives."

The Heartland Center´s role includes agenda development for these annual institutes, plus helping the 11 projects maintain connections throughout the year. Other learning partners include the Heller Graduate School at Brandies University and the Ray Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resources at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Hitachi Foundation is a nonprofit, philanthropic organization incorporated in the District of Columbia in 1985 with an endowment from Hitachi, Ltd. in Tokyo. The Foundation was established to promote social responsibility through effective participation in global society.