Foundations

The first question raised in the Ask the Inspector column by Bill Ross (June 10) addressed the problem of older homes which are not bolted to their foundations. The answer to this question implies that a lack of such bolting is not necessarily bad and in fact does not really constitute a hazard. I think the Los Angeles Times does a disservice by perpetuating the myth that just because a building has been in existence through many past seismic events it is structurally adequate and no strengthening is necessary.

It's called Lot 160, a 5-inch glass tube that's unremarkable in every way - except that it purportedly held blood drawn from President Ronald Reagan as he lay struggling for life after an assassination attempt. The vial, partially coated with a ring of a residue, is being offered for sale by a British online auction house where bids Tuesday reached nearly $15,000. A label and an accompanying document identify it as having contained a blood sample taken from Reagan at George Washington University Hospital on March 30, 1981, the day he was shot outside aWashington, D.C., hotel.

Foundations play a role in setting social policy by their choices of organizations and programs to fund. The following list briefly describes the gift patterns of California's top foundations. They are ranked by grants given in a year, not by assets or endowments. William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Menlo Park Grants given for calendar year 1989: $39.5 million.

PHILADELPHIA - Saturday the Barnes Foundation opens its new museum here on the busy Benjamin Franklin Parkway. With hundreds of Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses and Picassos, it's just up the street from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose officials were instrumental in pulling strings to make it happen. Anticipation has been running high. Eight years ago a local judge granted permission for the incomparable art installation to relocate from its unique home out on the Main Line, available to anyone who wished to visit.

PepsiCo Inc. agreed to make a donation to the foundation of a rapper whose ad the company yanked, averting a boycott threatened by hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. The agreement calls for Pepsi to make a multimillion-dollar donation over several years to Ludacris Foundation, Simmons' Hip-Hop Summit Action Network said. The amount of the donation and the length of time still were being worked out.

An invitation to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to speak at Cal State Stanislaus' 50th anniversary gala is generating controversy and raising questions about the foundation that is paying her. The nonprofit is refusing to divulge her speaking fees. The foundation's secrecy has raised scrutiny over the financial dealings and clout of that group and scores of others like it that are associated with California's public universities. The foundations raise billions of dollars for scholarships and other programs, run student organizations and bookstores and perform other crucial campus functions.

In a sharp break from past practice, major charitable foundations are initiating or strengthening efforts to harmonize the social and environmental effect of their endowment investments with their philanthropic goals. "A head of steam has been created around the issue of 'mission-related investing,' " said Douglas Bauer, senior vice president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which consults with foundations. "More and more foundations are wrestling with the issue." The $8.

Linda Jennings, executive director of the Tustin Public Schools Foundation, has stepped down from her six-year post to pursue other interests, officials said this week. Since the foundation was formed in 1989, Jennings has helped secure more than $500,000 in donations, which have funded Tustin school programs in math, science, language studies, performing and fine arts, and technology.

Kent Gibson has been named executive director of the California State University Dominguez Hills Foundation, campus officials said. Gibson replaced Wanda Hill, who left as part of an administrative shake-up initiated by President Robert Detweiler.

Leaders of the nation's largest and oldest Latino civil rights organization wrested control of its charitable foundation from the foundation's board of directors Friday in a continuing dispute over a failure to account for as much as $88,000 in donations.

The California Science Center has received what officials describe as an "extraordinary" financial contribution to the new Air and Space Center that will house the space shuttle Endeavour. The gift, to be announced at a news conference Thursday, comes from a foundation chaired by Lynda Oschin, wife of the late Los Angeles businessman and philanthropist Samuel Oschin, whose name already graces the Griffith Observatory planetarium and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center cancer institute stemming from charitable contributions there.

PHILADELPHIA - Copies of famous paintings are everywhere: on dorm-room walls, on computer screens and lately pouring forth from Chinese art factories, which can churn out a hundred passable Rembrandts in a week. Architectural copies, on the other hand, remain rare, especially at full scale. Las Vegas and the original Getty Museum aside, it's not often you see an important building, in whole or in part, rebuilt in one location to match the original in another. The Barnes Foundation, in moving its spectacularly deep collection of postimpressionist and early Modern art from suburban Merion, Pa., to the center of Philadelphia, will on May 19 open a high-culture, high-stakes experiment in the second kind of duplication.

Once again addressing the controversial issue of executive pay, a panel of the California State University Board of Trustees voted Tuesday to freeze state-funded pay for new campus presidents but allow individual college foundations to raise funds to boost those salaries. The nonprofit campus foundations would be able to augment taxpayer-funded pay for new executives up to 10% above that of their predecessor. The policy would be reviewed in 2014. Four members of the Special Committee on Presidential Selection and Compensation meeting in Long Beach voted for the change, with one member absent.

A faculty governing body at Los Angeles Trade Technical College issued a no-confidence vote in the college president and called on him to resign over a financial scandal at the college's foundation. Roland "Chip" Chapdelaine announced earlier this month that he will retire in June 2013, when his contract ends. But faculty leaders said they want him out this year. Wednesday's no-confidence vote by the Academic Senate was the first in the school's history. The final vote was 17-1, with 6 abstaining.

When Jackie Morgan MacDougall and other parents learned that their Saugus Union School District received the least state aid of any district in the county, she said they had to act. With the state contemplating deeper aid cuts, MacDougall and others began circulating petitions to create an education foundation — a nonprofit organization in which community members raise funds for teacher grants, instructional equipment, extracurricular activities...

The embattled former chairman of a foundation at Los Angeles Trade Technical College that has come under scrutiny over its executive director's lavish perks and spending resigned from the board Thursday, with parting shots blaming the college president for some of the foundation's issues. Darryl Holter had previously stepped down as chairman of the foundation board, but on Thursday resigned from the panel altogether. Holter had been criticized for allowing the foundation's executive director, Rhea Chung, to receive the perks.

The challenge was this: For every used computer the community donated to a school, the Detwiler Foundation in San Diego would donate a new one. On Wednesday, the foundation made good, handing out 211 computers to 36 schools in Orange County, culminating a yearlong drive. The foundation, a nonprofit group committed to boost computer literacy in the state, issued the challenge early last year, for computers from a local business or other donor.

Amy Biehl would have turned 28 next week. Her parents say she would have taken the occasion to look back on her life and consider the miraculous changes she worked toward--before going right back to work helping others. But Biehl's life was cut short 19 months ago by an angry mob in South Africa, just months before the historic elections she worked so hard to see, and years before she accomplished all she could have done.

California has struck deals to keep 11 state parks open and more reprieves are in the works, whittling the number of parks that will be closed this summer because of budget cuts, officials said Tuesday. Private donors, foundations and other government entities have come forward with funding or operating agreements to keep the 11 parks open for one to three years, said Roy Stearns, deputy director of California State Parks. The agency announced last year that the state's fiscal troubles would force it to shutter 70 of the 278 parks in the system.

Reporting from Tucson — The Dodgers sent a part of their team to the Phoenix suburb of Surprise on Friday to face the Kansas City Royals. Another group traveled more than two hours from the team's spring-training complex to Tucson, where the Chicago White Sox were waiting for them. Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier were in the second group. So were fellow starters Dee Gordon, Juan Rivera, Mark Ellis and A.J. Ellis. Veteran reserves Tony Gwynn Jr. and Jerry Hairston Jr. also made the 130-mile trip.