Family Advisory Board

The Compton Foundation's Family Advisory Board (FAB) makes grants in four interest areas to organizations across the United States. The FAB supports creative projects in the Arts, Children & Youth, Sustainable Living, and Spiritual Awareness. The Family Advisory Board is particularly interested in funding projects that build bridges between these categories. Only proposals invited by the Family Advisory Board are considered by the Foundation.

Young people have critical resources of energy and innovation, yet contemporary society often isolates youth cultures from the mainstream and fails to appreciate their creativity. The Mosaic Multicultural Foundation uses storytelling, poetry, and performance to build personal connections that honor new ideas and engage teens in positive change in their communities. In Mosaic workshops, young people develop an artistic forum in which they can speak their personal truths. Foundation support for Mosaic's Voices of Youth program has allowed community audiences to see teens from different racial and ethnic backgrounds working in concert in ways that, on the one hand, show their different backgrounds and struggles and, on the other hand, demonstrate the common condition of human experience.

The Food Family Farming Foundation, an organization headed by 'renegade lunch lady' Ann Cooper, believes that healthy, fresh, and locally produced school lunch should be available to as many students as possible across the nation. With a grant from the Compton Foundation the organization is designing a website that makes providing a healthy school lunch easy for administrators and cooks alike at any school site. This website, called the Lunch Box, consists of four resource areas: menus and recipes, educational materials, resource guides and technical tools, and a social networking forum. The resources address the elements necessary to create and implement a successful sustainable school lunch program. The Lunch Box provides the groundwork from which schools can imagine, and then actually change, what their students eat.

Futurefarmers’ Renewable Energy Lavoratory (REL) is a series of participatory artistic interventions that involve the public in processing various materials into fertilizer to nourish urban agricultural systems: urine, algae, compost. With a grant from the Compton Foundation, Futurefarmers is using art and public programming to engage museum-goers in a conversation about the systemic relationships between human beings and the natural world, exploring the links between waste and productivity, as well as the ways water and nutrients circulate between biotic communities. Through the exhibitions, REL invites reflection on the relationship between the individual and the larger social whole, offering a new framework for how human beings might be re-imagined as part of the ecosystems that surround us.

Many indigenous people have maintained traditional connections to sacred landscapes and can offer important suggestions about how to reach a global understanding of human connections to land and water—connections critical to our survival as a species. The Sacred Land Film Project(SLFP) is producing a documentary called Losing Sacred Ground that follows the stories of indigenous communities from five different continents struggling to preserve sacred natural spaces. Continuing Compton Foundation support will allow SLFP to finish filming the Winnemem Wintu in California as the tribe attempts to gain tribal recognition and to prevent the US government from raising the height of Shasta Dam and flooding more of their spiritual sites. This documentary gives voice to native people worldwide who are building a land protection movement grounded in spiritual tradition.

Winner of the Peabody award in 2007, Speaking of Faith is a public radio weekly program about religion, meaning, ethics, and spiritual ideas. It is produced and distributed by American Public Media, and is currently broadcast on 237 public radio stations in the US, as well as around the world. Host Krista Tippett is credited with creating a new journalistic model employing a narrative approach to spiritual conversation, making the program riveting to audiences that include people from a wide range of faith traditions as well as those searching for faith or seeking to build their own spiritual practice. With Compton Foundation support, Speaking of Faith is producing programs that explore the area of spiritual awareness and the intersection of religion and spirituality with the arts, youth development, and sustainable living.

Campaign Finance

The Compton Foundation is committed to a democracy in which individual voters, not special interests, drive U.S. policy. Our elected representatives spend more and more time raising money for their campaigns, leaving less and less time to address the critical issues of importance to the American people. Public Campaign is a non-profit, non- partisan organization dedicated to sweeping campaign reform that aims to dramatically reduce the role of big special interest money in American politics. In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the need for reform of the process by which we fund our elections has grown even more urgent. A Compton grant to Public Campaign provides support for a special project to educate and activate business leaders and constituencies of color to support public campaign finance reform.