Foundation News

Mid-way through a three-year project with the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) funded by Koret, leaders at the Hayward Unified School District identified a gap in the number of students reaching AP math by senior year. Working with their NMSI team, they developed a new a summer program, Geometry for Acceleration, that has put nearly 100 high schoolers on a path to advanced math and college readiness.

In celebration of the de Young museum’s 125th anniversary, and on the occasion of reopening to the public after six months, the museum presents The de Young Open, a juried community art exhibition by artists from all nine Bay Area counties. Representing the breadth and depth of Bay Area creativity, 6,188 artists submitted 11,514 artworks. Working solely from images, a jury of curators and artists selected 877 artworks for display online and in the gallery. Exhibiting artists who choose to offer their work for sale retain 100 percent of the proceeds, the de Young’s way of further supporting the local art community.

GLIDE is a nationally recognized center for social justice, dedicated to fighting systemic injustices, creating pathways out of poverty and crisis, and transforming lives. Through its free meals program, integrated comprehensive services, advocacy initiatives, and inclusive community, GLIDE empowers individuals, families and children to achieve stability and thrive. GLIDE is on the forefront of addressing society’s most pressing issues, including poverty, housing and homelessness, and racial and social justice.

Second Harvest of Silicon Valley is one of the largest food banks in the nation and a leader in ending local hunger. The nonprofit distributes nutritious groceries through a network of partners at sites across Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. Due to the high cost of living in Silicon Valley and the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, hunger is at an all-time high. Second Harvest is now serving 500,000 people on average every month, which is twice as many people as they reached pre-pandemic.

The Koret Foundation announced funding for seven Bay Area food banks and meal delivery services, to help groups serving the hungry during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has caused the number of people requiring assistance to skyrocket. Michael Boskin, president of the Koret Foundation, said that he hopes Koret’s grants will “encourage other donors to do the same.”

Gladstone Senior Investigator Jennifer Doudna, PhD, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her transformative discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 system, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD. The gene-editing tool allows researchers to cut DNA in order to remove, replace, or add genes to a sequence, and has been adopted around the world to identify therapeutic targets, diagnose viral infection, and repair genetic mutations. Doudna joined Gladstone in 2018 to apply her technology to biomedical problems, while continuing her lab at UC Berkeley, where she has been a professor since 2002.

IsraAid—an Israeli international relief agency that provides aid during crises and natural disasters—is also addressing food insecurity during the coronavirus pandemic. Working locally with Koret grantees Second Harvest of Silicon Valley and the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, IsraAid is organizing volunteers from the Jewish community to assist in various ways from San Francisco down to San Jose.

On August 13, San Francisco Ballet premiered “Dance of Dreams,” a new dance film by Benjamin Millepied. Shot in iconic San Francisco locations with company dancers, the film is set to “Scène D’Amour” from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, recorded and mixed remotely by more than 60 SF Ballet Orchestra musicians.