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Special Projects

Meeting exceptional needs.

Although most grantmaking takes place in our programs, the Hewlett Foundation values being able to respond flexibly to unanticipated problems and opportunities. Therefore, our Board of Directors establishes an annual Special Projects budget for which the President is the cognizant program officer, and also maintains an Extraordinary Reserve, which is typically used for special grants of great magnitude.

On occasion, when existing program budgets cannot fully support an important effort, Special Projects provides supplemental funds; many of the 2006 grants were of this nature.

Grants are also made from Special Projects and the Extraordinary Reserve to institutions that play important state, national, or international roles but do not fall within the guidelines of particular programs. In 2006, such grants supported the New Vision Initiative of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the merger of the Peninsula Community Foundation and the Community Foundation Silicon Valley into the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Last year, the Foundation began pursuing a “common values” agenda with the related goals of reducing political polarization and increasing evidence-based public policymaking. This year, we made grants to the Consensus Building Institute for a leadership summit on U.S. engagement with the Muslim world, and to the Partnership for a Secure America and Stanford University’s Preventive Force project for bipartisan work on U.S. foreign policy. We have continued to support efforts to address polarization in California politics, including support for

  • the Commonwealth Club of California’s Voices of Reform Project,
  • the Public Policy Institute of California’s California 2025 project, and
  • Stanford University’s analysis of the institutional structure of California's political system.

We funded several social science research projects designed to improve philanthropy, with grants to California Institute of Technology for a study on volunteering, to Decision Research for a study of people's response to large-scale humanitarian crises, and to Princeton University for a conference on the psychology and behavioral economics related to philanthropic responses to disasters.

We also assisted a number of our grantees in purchasing videoconferencing equipment in order to reduce the need for time-consuming, emission-producing travel.

In 2006, Special Projects made grants totaling $25,716,836.