In 2007, we made subtle changes to our grantmaking programs, and we undertook both a strong response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and one important new initiative.

The subtle changes are several.We refined our focus in each of our four grant areas. As Unmi Song has noted in her letter, the refinement is most apparent in the Arts Education Program, where we have given a new name to an existing program, recognizing that our grantmaking in this area is really directed toward the needs of students in the population that all our grantmaking aims to serve. Our grantmaking in arts and culture has been largely focused for several years on arts education programs done in conjunction with the Chicago Public Schools. While we occasionally make grants to programs that are freestanding (that is, not done directly in partnership with one or more CPS schools), we increasingly limit our support in this area to arts education for students and professional development for arts educators.

The lessons of our high school initiative have caused us to give greater attention to teacher professional development in our Education Program.We are increasingly convinced that the quality of classroom teaching is the most important variable as we try to find a formula for a higher level of academic achievement among disadvantaged CPS students. We believe that professional development can have real impact on classroom teaching.We will be looking for other ways to foster better classroom teaching.

In our Employment Program, we are looking for programs that help individuals get and keep living-wage jobs.We have grown more interested in programs that teach employment-related literacy to job seekers. In our Health Program, we are particularly interested in strategic partnerships between health-care providers and community-based organizations.We are trying to facilitate access to health care, and to that end we are increasingly willing to support health policy advocacy by grantees who advocate for our target population.

We have supported organizations that provide relief for disaster victims for a number of years, and this component of our grantmaking has never been geographically limited. In the spring of 2006, we decided that the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was so great as to merit a special focus of this grantmaking on New Orleans.We think we made a difference in that community. Our work in New Orleans taught us lessons about our own vulnerability to the forces of nature.We have tried to bring those lessons home, and we are studying how best we can use our modest resources to help deal with the almost certain impact of climate change in our community. Public transit is one area we are considering; a better public transit system would lead to significant reductions in our production of greenhouse gases. And as Unmi and our wonderfully capable program staff are quick to remind us, public transit issues touch aspects of all our other grantmaking programs.

Howard M. McCue III, Chairman