Grantee Stories
JUMA: It starts with a job
Juma— the word for “work” in many African dialects—is a nonprofit social enterprise whose purpose is to employ young people who might otherwise have a hard time landing their first job. Juma’s motto is “It starts with a job.” Juma Youth have dealt with personal challenges. Many of them have experienced homelessness or housing instability, […]
Blending Holocaust testimony with music and technology
“The Children of Willesden Lane” is a true story. It begins in Vienna in 1938, when it quickly becomes dangerous to be Jewish. The heroine of the story is a young girl named Lisa Jura, who dreams of becoming a concert pianist. Her family is Jewish, and her parents are able to secure her a […]
The Saga of Rywka’s Diary: Giving voice to an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances
Ensuring the continuity of Jewish peoplehood has always been one of the Koret Foundation’s priorities. Central to our commitment is preserving and honoring the history of Jewish communities. We first wrote in 2017 about the discovery and publication of Rywka Lipszyc’s diary and the museum exhibition it inspired in Kraków. The exhibition is now traveling […]
Stanford Live: Collaborating and building community in the performing arts
Supporting arts organizations and cultural institutions has always been part of the Koret Foundation’s commitment to strengthening the Bay Area community. The pandemic put a hard stop to live performances for over a year, but also inspired innovation and collaboration. We recently caught up with Chris Lorway, executive director of Stanford Live, a longtime Koret […]
Koret Scholars: Persisting in college through a pandemic
Supporting institutions of higher learning has been a priority of the Koret Foundation since our founding. The Koret Scholars program, established in 2016, provides needs-based scholarships and other support to college students across the Bay Area who face the most barriers to college completion: low-income students, underrepresented minority students, and those who are the first […]
Improving outcomes for children with leukemia
The Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University are pooling their expertise and resources to develop targeted, personalized treatments for children with leukemia. The disease is usually successfully treated with chemotherapy, but about 20 percent of patients subsequently relapse. Many of these children do not survive. Some […]
Harnessing the potential of bioinformatics
Bioinformatics involves developing algorithms and computer software to record and analyze biological data. This young field holds enormous potential for introducing an era of personalized medicine to treat diseases from cancer and diabetes to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. To advance this goal, Tel Aviv University (TAU) and UC Berkeley (UCB) are conducting collaborative research to develop […]
Hunting for predictors of neurodegenerative diseases
Tel Aviv University (TAU) and Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Biomedical Data Science are collaborating to identify biomarkers in the earliest stages of four neurodegenerative diseases that have thus far proven basically unstoppable: Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, and Huntington’s. The prevalence of these devastating diseases continues to increase, and research to date seems to […]
Preparing for widespread trauma and emergencies
The Rambam Health Care Campus (Rambam), located in Haifa on the Mediterranean coast, is collaborating with Stanford University’s Department of Biomedical Data Science on a broad range of projects. These collaborations have rich potential for advances both in digital health and in big data analysis. Rambam brings first-hand experience through its Center for Trauma, Emergency […]
US-Israel Partnerships: Accelerating medical innovation
One way to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship is by developing new approaches—learning with and from each other—to solving some of the world’s toughest health challenges. San Francisco Bay Area universities are drawing on their traditions of distinguished scholarship to forge the cutting edge of data science and analysis. Israeli scientists have relatively quickly garnered international […]
Koret Scholarships: Increasing college persistence and success
The Bay Area is home to an impressive concentration of colleges and universities. It is also demographically diverse, home to many students who ardently hope to be the first in their families to earn a college degree. For some first-generation college students, acceptance to a school and the means to cover tuition are merely the […]
Cross-disciplinary research: Stanford University
At Stanford University, the Koret Foundation is supporting programs that connect students and faculty across disciplines to advance knowledge and research, encourage collaborations among American and Israeli researchers, and strengthen the campus community. Koret funding is also supporting two new grant programs within Stanford’s School of Medicine. “Early career faculty development” grants provide flexible funding […]