California Endowment Organization

Can a cluster of light-filled meeting rooms make California a healthier place? That's the hope of the California Endowment, a $3.7-billion fund created nine years ago to improve the health of state residents. On Thursday, the endowment officially opened the Center for Healthy Communities, an architecturally striking compound in downtown Los Angeles that offers the state's thousands of health-related nonprofit groups a simple but potentially powerful tool: a place to gather.

An obscure state board awarded six- and seven-figure grants Wednesday to dozens of museums and cultural groups, including several that legislators long have championed. The California Cultural and Historical Endowment Board gave out more than $35 million for projects that included rebuilding a military fort at an Indian reservation outside Fresno, restoring murals at the Santa Monica Public Library and remodeling a downtown Los Angeles building to house the Latino Theater Company.

The California Endowment launched a five-year, $20-million initiative Thursday to increase health-care coverage for low-income Los Angeles County families through outreach programs geared to ethnic minorities. Schools, small businesses and community-based organizations will be the main channels through which California's largest health-care foundation will seek to boost enrollment in the state's Medi-Cal and Healthy Families programs.

The California Endowment, one of the nation's largest health-care foundations, said it will build a headquarters complex and conference center adjacent to the historic Terminal Annex in downtown Los Angeles on a 6.5-acre parcel it purchased for $11.3 million.

One of the nation's largest health-care foundations said Tuesday it is exploring the construction of a new 100,000-square-foot headquarters complex in downtown Los Angeles near historic Union Station. The Woodland Hills-based California Endowment, which is backed with $3.7 billion in assets, said it is also considering leasing existing downtown office space as an alternative to building a new, $30-million structure on the grounds of Union Station.

Children who eat school lunches, take nutritional education classes and have limited access to soft drink and candy machines are less likely to be unhealthy, according to a study released Tuesday.

California foundation leaders called for help Tuesday for a growing number of victims of the Sept. 11 tragedy: nonprofit groups that are losing donations as they face increasing pressure to provide food and medical care to people who have lost their jobs. A survey of 413 nonprofit providers of "safety net" services to low-income Californians showed a $25-million drop in donations--a figure representing a small portion of the money lost by the safety net nonprofits in the state.

She was elderly and suffering from severe asthma. Her Medi-Cal benefits were cut off Jan. 1 because the county said she had not submitted the proper forms. The woman said she had turned in the paperwork three times. The woman, who desperately needed medical care, was at a dead end. But in early March she found Nora Boyajian, a paralegal counselor with the Health Consumer Center, a free advocacy hotline that assists low-income Los Angeles County residents.

Away from the philanthropic foundations housed in high-rises, with their fancy luncheons and multimillion-dollar grants to universities and museums and the like, there is another more grass-roots, community-based level of giving in California that largely remains out of the mainstream. In this state of shifting demographics, there is the world of storefront nonprofits in East L.A.

The Great Central Valley, with its 15% unemployment rates and some of the poorest cities in the state, is a region of urgent needs. For years, one of the more pressing concerns has been the shortage of housing for the hundreds of thousands of farm workers who pick the nation's richest crops here. To help meet the need, a private foundation is giving $31 million to build housing and health care facilities for farm workers, both the migrants who cross the U.S.