In 2007, the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. It was a year marked by new opportunities and transitions.We made a special set of grants to help rebuild health care services in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.We renamed our arts and culture grantmaking program "Arts Education" to reflect more accurately our long-standing commitment to arts education programs for Chicago public school students.We said good-bye to our colleague Ernest Vasseur and wished him well in his new role as the founding executive director of the Healthcare Foundation of Northern Lake County. And we welcomed our new Health Program officer, Soo Na, who joins us from the Asian Health Coalition, and our new Program Analyst, Jessica Brown, a recent public policy graduate from the University of Chicago.

We also began investigating a new area of grantmaking—confronting the problems of climate change. Our first grant in this area supported research and analysis by the University of Illinois on the kinds of changes to climate we should expect in the Chicago region. This grant also supported analysis by the Center for Neighborhood Technology to inventory sources of local greenhouse gas emissions. This work is being used to inform development of the city's Climate Action Plan. In the coming year, we will continue to identify and make strategic investments in local responses to this global problem.We are especially interested in efforts that address our concerns about low-income families.

One thing that has not changed in the last year is the Foundation's commitment to understanding how organizations monitor and assess the quality and effectiveness of programs. Someone recently asked me if the Foundation's emphasis on assessments reflected a loss of optimism or lack of confidence in our grantees' abilities to provide high quality services and use our funds well. I was surprised by the question because our emphasis stems from the exact opposite point of view. It is precisely because we have tremendous confidence in the work of our grantees that we want to learn so much from them. What does it take to help a chronically homeless person find and keep a job? This is probably one of the most difficult challenges a person, a program, a society could endeavor to address. And what about introducing the arts in a way that helps children expand their views and explore new skills? This is not work that is simple to achieve, nor is it achieved simply by good intentions. This is work that happens when dedicated professionals combine passion with intellect and thoughtful analysis. The Foundation wants to learn from the groups that are striving to understand both what they are doing well and what they can do better in order to make a true difference in someone's life.We are funding groups that work hard, work smart, and strive to excel. I invite you to learn about some of these extraordinary efforts in the pages that follow.

Unmi Song, Executive Director