Magazine Honors Philanthropic Innovators in Education, Arts

Creative philanthropic approaches to schooling in Los Angeles and the arts in Chicago won recognition in the 2012 Innovator of the Year Awards handed out by The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Magazine.

Eric Eisner, a former movie and music mogul who founded the Young Eisner Scholars program to help children from some of Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods get to college, was named the magazine’s Innovator of the Year in education.

The article details how Mr. Eisner—who says he retired with no ambitions beyond enjoying the fortune he’d made in Hollywood—launched an organization that identifies and works directly with children from third grade on in southwestern Los Angeles, helping them develop intellectually and get placed at prep and magnet schools. This fall, 67 alumni of the program will enter Ivy League universities and other prestigious institutions.

Theaster Gates was honored as Innovator of the Year in the arts for his work creating art and new cultural amenities out of abandoned properties in his south Chicago community.

Mr. Gates, a sculptor, singer, and urban planner whose work has also made waves internationally in recent years, buys and strips boarded-up houses, hiring helpers from the local unemployed population. He uses cast-off materials from the buildings to create art and other objects and refashions the gutted interiors into libraries, cafes, and other anchors for depressed neighborhoods.