Interprogram Grants

Interprogram grants reinforce and build upon the connections that tie together the Foundation's four program areas: arts, health, environment, and Jewish life and encourage collaboration among program directors and cross-fertilization of ideas. These grants occur at the nexus of two program areas and reflect the basic themes that carry through all of our programs, such as concern for future generations. We believe this approach strengthens our grantmaking by recognizing and encouraging synergism between program areas.

ARTS - ENVIRONMENT

Artistic imagination and sensibility have the potential for helping our society devise new ways of relating to its natural environment. We seek to encourage the creative voices which bring innovation and inspiration to the environmental cause. In 1993, we supported artist James Turrell's Roden Crater Project, a major environmental art work located in a volcanic cinder cone in Northern Arizona. It is an interactive sculptural environment and its subject matter is natural light, sky, and earth. For both environmental and aesthetic reasons, the project is integrally involved with a land restoration program. Our grant supported the development of a management team of environmentalists, ranchers, landowners, and state and national environmental agencies to pursue strategies for proper land, livestock, and wildlife restoration and maintenance.

We also supported those who are considering ways in which the human-made landscape "the built environment" of homes, workplace, and their infrastructures-can become more energy-efficient, less toxic, and more conducive to civic life. The grant to the American Institute of Architects supported a pilot program to bring together energy-efficiency experts, practicing architects, engineers, developers, and commercial lenders to work collaboratively towards achieving results in ecologically and culturally sustainable architecture and design.

ARTS - HEALTH

Through our arts-health focus, we seek to enrich discussion about health issues through the media and other arts. We are concerned with the health hazards encountered by working in the visual and performing arts and diseases, like AIDS, that have had a devastating impact on the arts community. In 1993, we supported the work of dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones, to bring his unique artistic vision and personal experience to the question of survival in the face of terminal illness. Mr. Jones' project, Still Here, will engage people living with life-threatening illnesses in survival workshops and symposia which will form the basis of a major new dance work.

ENVIRONMENT - HEALTH

We believe that the quality of the physical environment impacts directly on human health and well-being. In 1993, the Foundation supported efforts to promote research, discussion, and public education on the links between toxins and human illness; campaigns to involve and protect local communities subjected to health risks caused by environmental contamination; and services to aid and empower those local campaigns and to link them with kindred efforts. Our grant to Physicians for Social Responsibility will enable the American doctors' group that first told the story of the medical consequences of nuclear war to turn its attention to the link between environmental protection and the public health. The program will bring the best available medical and public health expertise to bear on the development of new public policies; increase physicians' understanding of environmental health issues through professional training projects; and involve physicians around the country in all aspects of environmental policy making. The program will initially focus on three priority areas: pesticides; the Superfund; and issues of international toxic contamination, particularly along the US-Mexican border.

JEWISH LIFE - HEALTH

Through the Jewish life-health focus we support work with rabbis, health care-providers, and others who seek to enrich the exchange among medical, psychological, and spiritual approaches. In 1993, we renewed our support to the Jewish Healing Center in San Francisco. The Center is concerned with infusing the spirit into the mind-body connection; and with helping Jews to draw on the spiritual resources that give them hope, courage, and renew the sense of the meaning of their lives as they face their own illness or seek to help loved ones who are ill. Also in 1993 we helped to establish an organization in Israel to advocate for increased services for Israeli Arab and Jewish women. The Center for the Advancement of Women's Health will integrate education, research, policy analysis, and advocacy into an action-oriented program to improve the status of women's health and healthcare. The project grew out of seed money we gave the Israel Women's Network in 1992 to train Israeli and Arab women health educators and advocates. The goal of the Center will be to place this issue firmly on the public agenda while at the same time informing women of their rights and empowering them to take more control over their own health and well-being.

JEWISH LIFE - ARTS

In 1993, we supported efforts to educate the public about the growing right-wing movements in this country which are seeking to destabilize the arts community, and which may contribute to the rise of anti-Semitism. With Foundation support, the Religious Right Video History Project is developing a six hour public television series which will explore the history of the social and political forces that have shaped the religious right in America. The series will also examine this movement's growing influence in many a renas of American life, including the arts, health, environment, and Jewish life.

The Institute for First Amendment Studies monitors groups and individuals which pose a threat to the separation of church and state, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. The Institute's Committee on Religious Freedom identifies groups which discriminate on the basis of religion and monitors their activities. They feel that by informing the public about the agenda, goals, and political activities of the religious right, Americans will be better able to comprehend one of the basic sources of growing religious intolerance and bigotry in the nation.

ENVIRONMENT - JEWISH LIFE

Through our environment-Jewish life focus, we supported efforts to develop awareness in the Jewish community that concern for the environment is inherent in Jewish traditional wisdom, and to encourage environmental awareness and activism through Jewish forms. In the United States, our funds have gone to the Jewish components of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (administered from St. John the Divine in New York) as well as to Shomrei Ademah, an organization established for the purpose of re-awakening within American Jews a sense of the deep connections between love of nature and fidelity to the Jewish tradition.

We also encouraged the development of a sophisticated, effective environmental movement in Israel. The Foundation helped establish the Israel Union for Environmental Defense and allowed the venerable Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel to develop an assertive stance through its Environmental Action Unit. neva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">The Institute for First Amendment Studies monitors groups and individuals which pose a threat to the separation of church and state, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. The Institute's Committee on Religious Freedom identifies groups which discriminate on the basis of religion and monitors their activities. They feel that by informing the public about the agenda, goals, and political activities of the religious right, Americans will be better able to comprehend one of the basic sources of growing religious intolerance and bigotry in the nation.