Irvine Foundation Gives $2.8Million to Riot Areas

The James Irvine Foundation announced Monday that it has awarded $2.8 million to 31 community organizations working in riot-affected areas of Los Angeles as part of the foundation’s Rebuilding Community grants program.

The contributions mark the largest initiative by a private foundation to inner-city groups since the spring riots.

“This support is aimed at improving race relations and enhancing leadership and citizen involvement, with particular attention to investment in the city’s young people,� said Dennis A. Collins, president of the foundation. The grants “attempt to link short-term interventions with long-term strategies,� he said.

The grants range in size from $10,000 to $400,000 and include support for a major neighborhood planning and leadership development initiative by the Coalition of Neighborhood Developers, a group that has been working in the city’s neglected areas for several years.

“Irvine was courageous and creative to see the project’s worth and they’ve really worked to get other funders to the table,� said Juanita Tate, a longtime South-Central Los Angeles activist who chairs the coalition.

The Irvine Foundation, with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco, is the largest philanthropic foundation in the state that restricts its grants to programs that benefit Californians. The foundation was established in 1938 by James Irvine, who developed the ranch holdings in Orange County.

Last July, when a coalition of activists accused major foundations of redlining--or systematically ignoring--Los Angeles’ poor neighborhoods, the Irvine Foundation was one of the few cited as exceptions.

In recent years, the foundation has made a growing number of grants to community organizations, often minority-led, that work on local economic development, leadership training and related activities.

Shortly after violence erupted April 29, Collins commissioned a study on riot-torn areas to help guide the foundation’s giving in the wake of the disturbances. The report, by Craig Howard of the National Economic Development and Law Center, urged a broad-based strategy of short-term and long-term initiatives and cautioned against focusing solely on small business programs, as was being urged in some quarters.

“While the current interest in minority development and in rebuilding the structures which were destroyed during the riots are necessary components of a recovery, these approaches alone are far from sufficient if the desire is to build a healthy community after nearly three decades of decline,� Howard wrote.

He urged, among other things, a human development strategy to deal with “deep-seated causes of persistent intergenerational poverty� in the areas affected by the riots. Howard cautioned: “We’re likely to find that if capital investments are not accompanied by equally well thought out and scaled human investments, those areas of the city will, at best, ‘recover’ to the undesirable state that they were in before the Rodney King verdict.�

The grants that Irvine Foundation announced reflect, in large measure, the human development approach. Among them are:

* $400,000 to the National Health Foundation for the continuation of a prenatal and obstetrics access project the foundation helped launch last year. Agency Vice President Marlene Larson said the project was a response to overcrowded conditions at county health facilities, where low-income women “were delivering babies in corridors� and sometimes had to wait a dangerously long six to seven weeks for prenatal care appointments.

* $200,000 to the California Medical Center Foundation for start-up of a comprehensive perinatal services program and education for adolescent parents and on chemical dependency.

* $175,000 to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Long Beach in support of the Franklin Middle School Project, a community-designed youth development program.

* $125,000 to the Central American Refugee Center for community education, civic participation and leadership training of Los Angeles’ Central American population.

* $125,000 to El Rescate to provide community education, English language and literacy training and coalition building with other ethnic and racial populations of Los Angeles.

* $100,000 to Clinica Para Las Americas to hire an experienced bilingual doctor.

* $100,000 to the Coalition for Women’s Economic Development to support a small enterprise development program.

* $100,000 to the Los Angeles Multi-Cultural Collaborative to support start-up costs of a multicultural coalition to develop and promote improved intergroup relations in Los Angeles.

* $50,000 to the Black Employees Assn. toward start-up costs for the South-Central Los Angeles Community Development Federal Credit Union.

* $50,000 for organizational and development support to Asian Pacific Americans for a New Los Angeles, to build consensus and a coalition around issues of improved race relations and civic participation.