On a warm, windy day in June 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Fresno and spoke to a crowd of thousands. His visit was part of a statewide effort to stop legislation that would legalize racial discrimination in housing.  King, along with Fresno Mayor Wallace D. Henderson and approximately 1,000 people, marched from Fresno High School to Ratcliffe Stadium. At the venue, King addressed nearly 3,000 people about desegregation, fair housing, the Rumford Housing Act, and Calif

The early San Joaquin College of Law building under construction on the Fresno Pacific University campus, circa 1970. San Joaquin College of Law was one of the first recipients of a grant from the Fresno Regional Foundation in 1973. Photo courtesy of the Fresno City & County Historical Society and the Pop Laval Foundation.  All rights reserved. In 1973, the Fresno Regional Foundation, which would later become the Central Valley Community Foundation, made its first grants. The

You could say Richard Burrell has seen it all. Not because he wanted to, but because it was the life he was born into. A life that could have ended in addiction, prison, gangs, or even death at a young age. A life that could have made him hard and cynical.  Instead, he turned his energy to helping kids who are where he was, literally. Richard grew up on Parkway Drive, long seen as Fresno’s epicenter of crime, poverty, and despair.  On a spring day in 2012, long removed from a