The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Serving the Community
through the Arts

Since its founding in 1976 as a way to make video technology available to independent motion picture makers, the Bay Area Video Arts Coalition has become one of the nation’s most advanced media access and training centers, producing more than 12,000 non-commercial media projects and training 35,000 people to use its state-of-the-art facilities.

Today BAVAC is a hive of media activity, helping to create SPARK, a San Francisco public television documentary on local artists; teaching low-income youth to create media content; and even supporting a hip-hop music label. Since the late 1990s, its YouthLink program has helped train a new generation of media-makers through a comprehensive after-school program in Web design and video production.

A Hewlett Foundation grant recipient since 1983, the Coalition hopes to use its current funding to increase distribution of its training DVD and increase its online training products to reach 5,000 users by the end of 2007, among other goals.

Going to Bat for Bay Area Youth

One of the most effective ways to promote the healthy development of young people—physically, emotionally, and cognitively—is high-quality, after-school sports programs.

Founded in 2001 with a focus on San Francisco and Alameda counties, Team-Up for Youth initially focused on working with sports organizations to level the playing field for low-income children by assuring that coaches and affordable equipment were available.

Team-Up quickly has become recognized as one of the nation’s premier youth sports development agencies, cultivating leadership and public engagement and sharing successful techniques with a wide range of policymakers. In addition to making $4 million in grants to expand youth sports in the Bay Area, Team-Up has created a program that trains scores of college students to serve as volunteer coaches, among other initiatives.

In 2006 the Hewlett Foundation joined Team-Up for Youth’s founding funders—the Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; and others—becoming a backer with a $200,000 grant for general support.