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Accomplishments:

• Significant progress was made toward achieving the goals and objectives of the VPI Leadership Program. The California Peace Prize was awarded to 30 individuals, and 64 Academic Fellows and 71 Community Fellows completed their fellowships.
• The California Peace Prize created greater public awareness of individuals and programs working to prevent violence in California. The Peace Prize has become a prestigious award that has name recognition in the state and has provided a yearly opportunity to publicize the issue of violence in the media and with policymakers. The efforts of the TCWF communications staff, media strategies and opinion leader mailings have resulted in raising the issue of violence in the public sphere and provided coverage of the individuals and the issue throughout the state. Media strategies have resulted in an estimated 175 media stories about awardees, including coverage in the California Journal, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle.
• The impact of the Academic Fellowships on particular fields and at sites has been profound. In the field of child and adolescent psychiatry and psychology, the topic of violence, as an area of research and discussion, has increased substantially as a direct result of the work of the Principal Investigator and Fellows at Stanford University. At several sites, violence prevention has been integrated into the general work of the Institutions, and programs that did not exist were established as a result of the fellowship and will continue after the end of TCWF funding.
• The Community Leaders Fellowship Program developed individual leadership skills and the capacity of organizations as well. Although the program was designed for individuals, many participants worked in differing capacities within organizations and brought the skills they developed to their respective organizations, expanding the reach of the program beyond the initial intended goal. In many cases, community programs were expanded.

Challenges:

• Maintaining a confidential process for the California Peace Prize has been challenging in the face of inquiries from media, elected, and other high-profile officials. The Peace Prize has become prestigious because of the commitment and willingness of those involved to maintain confidentiality. However, this commitment cannot and did not prevent inquiries and attempts by some to become nominators and/or recipients of the award.
• Ensuring ethnic diversity of Academic Fellows was a major challenge for this program. One of the objectives of the program was to support professional training of ethnic minorities in violence prevention; nearly half (47%) of the Fellows were people of color and 81% were women. The earlier years of the fellowship did in fact have more diverse pools of Fellows; however, over time, the number of people of color in the cohorts diminished. The change in policy of the Regents of California and Proposition 209 may have had a significant effect on recruitment.
• The Community Leaders Fellowship (CLF) Program included requirements for mentoring youth; however, the mentoring component of the CLF might have been too ambitious. The original thinking was that participants in the CLF would mentor two youth and these youth would develop job training and leadership skills. This proved to be a difficult task for the Fellows to achieve, in part due to turnover of the mentee youth and the amount of time required to mentor a young person.
• The use of intermediaries to provide logistical support, training and oversight of the Community Leaders Fellowship Program caused significant confusion and tension between the intermediary, Fellows and the Foundation. This confusion and tension prevented consistent programmatic goals, as well as hampered “institutional memory” as it related to addressing challenges and retooling the program. There was also confusion among Fellows as to whether the goal of the CLF was professional or personal development, skills building or a sabbatical opportunity. This was in part due to the ever-changing management of the Fellowship program, as well as the changing format of the program itself.
• In several cohorts, some Fellows worked at organizations already funded by the VPI, which created tension among grantees and charges of “favoritism.” While the thinking might have been that this award would strengthen those organizations funded in other VPI components, these decisions were perhaps shortsighted and did not take into consideration the closeness and ongoing communication of the Initiative grantees.

Lessons Learned:

• The impact of the California Peace Prize has far-reaching leadership and policy implications. The Peace Prize is an internal process and is a relatively low-cost endeavor with high return and with much of the time spent being staff time. The annual award has become an opportunity for increasing statewide visibility of the issue of violence prevention, and the successful media strategies targeting policymakers and the public have complemented the policy advocacy and public education efforts of other VPI grantees.
• Confidentiality for the nomination and selection process of the Community Leaders Fellowship Program and the California Peace Prize was crucial. Through written and verbal communication to all involved, an element of surprise was maintained and the integrity of the process was ensured.
• Academic Fellowship sites that were most successful and had an impact have tended to be those with strong, charismatic leadership that had Principal Investigators (PIs) with a strong connection to the issue and a commitment to development of leadership in the field. Identifying sites with this type of leadership was critical to accomplishing the goals set out by the leadership programs of the VPI. Future grantmaking for this type of fellowship should take the leadership of applicant organizations into consideration.
• Helping PIs develop skills in the area of minority recruitment and retention issues might have ensured a stronger, more diverse fellowship program. It is unclear how strongly each site embraced the specific goals of diversity as outlined, and the number of PIs of color was limited. While increasing diversity among PIs does not necessarily guarantee fellow diversity, one could argue that in academic settings, professors of color are often more in touch with ethnic minority students and may have been better positioned to identify and recruit students of color for the fellowship program.
• Goals of fellowship programs should be clear and consistent. While it is important to have programs evolve and grow and be responsive to feedback and evaluation of the program, the growth and evolution should not occur immediately after each cohort. Instead, program revisions should be incorporated after a number of years transpire and several cohorts complete the program to get a more comprehensive review.