The Annenberg Foundation: No Small Dreams

   Goethe’s dictum," Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the heart," is prominently displayed on the Annenberg Foundation’s website.
   Established in 1989, the Foundation is the successor corporation to the Annenberg School at Radnor, Pennsylvania, which was founded in 1958 by Walter H. Annenberg.
   An Ambassador to the Court of St. James from 1968 to 1974, and a philanthropist, Annenberg was also a publisher and broadcaster. He was president, and subsequently, chairman of the board, of Triangle Publications, which owned TV Guide and Seventeen magazine, as well as radio and TV stations nation-wide.
   In its words, “The Annenberg Foundation exists to advance the public well-being through improved communication. As the principal means of achieving this goal, the Foundation encourages the development of more effective ways to share ideas and knowledge.”
   It focuses on four major program areas: education and youth, arts and culture, community and civic, and health.
   Ambassador Annenberg founded The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 and The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in 1971.
   In 1983, he established the Washington Program in Communication Policy Studies in response to a growing awareness that difficult government and industry problems were emerging in the rapidly changing telecommunications field.
   Again, in its own words, “The Foundation's primary grant-making interests are in education, culture, the arts, and community and civic life. It provides funding for programs likely to produce beneficent change on a large scale.”
   In addition to the national Challenge Grant for Public School Reform, a $500 million matching grants program of 18 locally-designed projects, the Foundation and its predecessor organizations provided support for a 20-year partnership in educational programming with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
   Announced in December 1993 at the White House, the "Challenge to the Nation" became the largest public/private effort in American history to improve public schools.
   Eighteen locally designed Challenge projects were set up in 35 states and funded 2,400 public schools that served more than 1.5 million students and 80,000 teachers. Over 1,600 businesses, foundations, colleges, and universities, and individuals across the country contributed $600 million in private matching funds.
   Each Challenge project was designed to fit unique local conditions and was planned collaboratively by educators, foundation officers, and community, civic, and business leaders. The grants ranged from $1 million to $53 million.
   On June 12, 2002, the Foundation released the final report on its school reform effort. The report, "The Annenberg Challenge: Lessons and Reflections on Public School Reform," describes the Challenge's achievements in improving urban, rural, and arts education. The report was released to the press and an audience of education leaders and policymakers at an event held in Washington D.C. Then-U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige was the keynote speaker. luncheon.
   The Annenberg Institute for School Reform published "Research Perspectives on School Reform: Lessons from the Annenberg Challenge," a collection of essays from a cross-section of Annenberg Challenge projects that offers an inside view of what the Challenge sites set out to do and how the partnerships between Challenge research and program staffs at the sites helped clarify and refocus the work over time.
   The Institute also issued "The Arts and School Reform: Lessons and Possibilities from the Annenberg Challenge Arts Projects," a report that draws on overarching lessons from the work of the three Challenge Arts projects: the Center for Arts Education in New York City, the Minneapolis Arts for Academic Achievement program, and the national “Transforming Education Through the Arts Challenge.”
   In addition, the Foundation made a $500,000 grant to support the implementation in three California school districts of the recommendations for civic education and engagement contained in the Carnegie Corporation of New York's 2003 report, “'The Civic Mission of Schools.:
   And it gave $2 million in a non-matching grant and $1.2 million in a challenge grant to enable “the Global Classrooms initiative to expand the Model United Nations program” to urban classrooms, and enhance professional development, curricular and on-line resources.
   Other major grants have been made to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Academy of Music in Philadelphia, Metropolitan Opera, and the Music Center of Los Angeles County.
   Recent awards have been made in support of major design and construction projects, including the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, DC, the Liberty Bell Pavilion and the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and The British Museum in London.
   Not long ago, the Foundation made a grant to Beverly Hills to turn an old post office into a cultural arts center.
   The Foundation’s headquarters are in Radnor, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. Its Los Angeles office is in Westwood.