The Art of Giving 2005 Awards

(page 2 of 2)

Voices for Children, Nonprofit Organization of the Year

Voices for Children (VFC) is a nonprofit agency that provides assistance to the abused, abandoned and neglected children in San Diego’s foster care system. Through its volunteer network of highly trained Court Appointed Special Advocates, or CASAs, VFC strives to enhance each child’s physical and emotional well-being and his or her right to a safe and permanent home. CASAs advise the court on diverse issues, helping the judges make crucial decisions on behalf of the children by providing written reports based on intensive research and interviews about each case. Equally significant, CASAs befriend these children, providing a sense of stability and continuity in their time of crisis and in the longer term. By recruiting, training and supervising these volunteers, Voices for Children serves the San Diego community and helps these children become productive and successful adults.

Since its award last year from San Diego Magazine, Voices for Children has initiated a new 10-year vision to “Serve Every Child.” The goal is two-fold: to expand its assessment and monitoring role to include each of the approximately 8,000 children in the system, and to provide advocates to the most vulnerable of these children—approximately 3,500—with emphasis on infants and toddlers and children newly entering the system.

Joan & Irwin Mark Jacobs, Philanthropists of the Year

Joan K. Jacobs is a leading member of the San Diego community. She has dedicated her time and energy to serving on many community groups and committees. To mention only a few of her contributions, Ms. Jacobs cofounded Friends of the UCSD International Center, founded and cochairs the Friends of the Stuart Collection and founded and chaired the San Diego Symphony Gold Ribbons Patrons. She led the capital campaign for a major expansion of the Jewish Community Center and currently serves on several boards, including the La Jolla Playhouse and the executive committee of the Jewish Community Foundation. She chairs the board of the San Diego Symphony Foundation and is on the artistic director search committee for the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Centers for La Jolla Playhouse.

Dr. Irwin Mark Jacobs is cofounder and chair of the board of directors of Qualcomm Incorporated, a cofounder of Linkabit and a former professor at MIT and UCSD. Dr. Jacobs has received many honors, including election to the National Academy of Engineering and awarding of the National Medal of Technology by President Clinton, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the Dorothy I. Height Chair’s Award of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Financial Times.

Together, Jacobs family members have made immeasurable contributions to San Diego. A significant contribution to the Salk Institute helped establish the Crick-Jacobs Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology to study how genes influence brain functions. The new state-of-theart theater in the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park bears their name. Other major contributions have benefited the San Diego Symphony, the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Children’s Museum of San Diego.