In January 2008, Community Partners will bid farewell to a dear friend and colleague who has formed a new business, Walden Philanthropy Advisors (http://waldenphil.com).  Gwen Walden, Director of The California Endowment’s Center for Healthy Communities, played a pivotal role over several years in the design, planning, and construction of TCE’s new downtown campus, which is also our home.  With great appreciation for her leadership and vision, we dedicate this month’s message to her. 

What A Difference A Place Makes 

Wander almost any day of the week into the courtyard outside the building where Community Partners has its offices and you will find people sharing a meal, engaged in conversation, laughing out loud, emphasizing a point, or quietly concentrating.  Whether immersed in the courtyard bustle, or attentively taking in the scene around them, most have been drawn to this lively space from gatherings in the many meeting and work spaces opening onto the courtyard.  Diverse as Los Angeles is diverse, men and women cluster, animated, around lunch tables or tip back circled chairs in the shaded sprawl of canvas umbrellas, tall shrubs, and trimmed trees.  Others converse in pairs, sitting on the concrete benches built to partly surround a pleasant fountain pond.  Some stroll and stop, stroll and stop, stilling themselves long enough to finish a discussion with a colleague or friend before moving on again, perhaps toward coffee or lunch in the café, or a workshop or project back indoors.  From an open lip on one side of the pond flows a glistening sheet of water, the sound of its background drop and splash helping mute traffic noise from the busy adjacent boulevard, easing conversation. 

The ebb and flow of purposeful human activity in this courtyard – this inviting, unassuming commons – has, for me, come to symbolize what The California Endowment intended when it conceived its downtown headquarters and opened its ground floor Center for Healthy Communities for wide public use nearly two years ago.  Instead of imposing on the eclectic surrounding neighborhood a grand edifice to bleat and blare its good works to the world, The California Endowment understated the campus design, celebrated Southern California’s happy affair with sunlight and allowed meaning and utility to emerge over time from what people chose to do in this place.  And when you reduce to a core all that goes on here, what emerges in the distinctive character of this place are strengthened relationships between and among people. 

The California Endowment’s placement of a courtyard at the center of its office campus moves the foundation, for all of its good works, far beyond the traditional, time-worn discourse of grant maker and grantee.  That vital and necessary dialogue by all means still goes on, benefiting in the process many people in communities around the state.  But to it has been added a new, profoundly hopeful dimension that other philanthropies, nonprofits, businesses, and public agencies would do well to emulate.  That dimension is “civic” space; the places shaped by nothing more nor less than what happens in them between people.  With thought and foresight, it is possible to design and shape the construction of spaces like this in ways that make it easy and natural for us to see one another, meet by chance, or by plan, and let our natural communal instincts guide the rest.  Such places incubate the kind of mutual trust essential to unleashing the health-giving potential of community.  Such is the courtyard a step outside our door, a place that adds life to the place where we live.

Paul Vandeventer, President & CEO, Community Partners

December 2007