People: Campus for Jewish Life named for Taube People: Campus for Jewish Life named for Taube (November 23, 2005)

The Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture and the Koret Foundation, headed by Tad Taube of Woodside, have awarded $15 million in grants to the Taube-Koret Campus for Jewish Life in Palo Alto.

The $200 million development will include a community center and senior housing on an 8-5-acre site at 901 San Antonio Road, the former home of Sun Microsystems.

Groundbreaking is planned for late 2006 and construction is expected to take two years.

The campus will be home for the Albert L. Schultz Jewish Community Center and 176 senior residences, some with assisted-living facilities.

Mr. Taube is chairman and founder of the Woodmont Companies in Belmont, a real estate investment and management firm. He was chairman and CEO of Koracorp Industries (successor to Koret of California) from 1973 until its merger with Levi Strauss & Co. in 1979.

A Stanford alumnus, Mr. Taube has made major gifts to the university for the Jewish Studies Program, the Hoover Institution and the Taube Family Tennis Center. The Taube-Hillel Center for Jewish Life at Stanford is named for him.

Mr. Taube lives in Woodside with his wife, Dianne, and two children.
Packard foundation elects Tom David, Bill Johnson

Tom David of Menlo Park is one of seven new board members for the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health. Mr. David, a philanthropy consultant, was elected in November to serve a three-year term on the board.

Mr. David was responsible for health grant-making at the James Irvine Foundation in San Francisco from 1987 to 1994. In 2002, he was recruited to be the founding director of organizational learning and evaluation at the Marguerite Casey Foundation in Seattle. He returned to the Bay Area in 2004 to launch a consulting business.

Bill Johnson, president of Embarcadero Publishing Co., which owns the Almanac, has also been elected to the board. A Palo Alto resident, Mr. Johnson serves on the National Advisory Board for the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University and is a member of several boards of directors, including the California Newspaper Publishers Association, and Community Foundation Silicon Valley, where he heads the board's distributions committee.
Local residents enroll at Harvard

Harvard College announced that two local residents have enrolled as freshmen: Spencer A. Strub, who graduated from Menlo-Atherton High School and is the son of Tracy and Liane Strub of El Granada; and Kyle Lawrence Kritzik McAuley, who graduated from Woodside Priory School and is the son of Bruce McAuley and Susan Kritzik of Portola Valley.

The students are among approximately 1,650 students in Harvard's freshman class, chosen from nearly 23,000 applicants, a Harvard record, the school said.
Hal Urban wins award for character education

Hal Urban, a former Woodside High School teacher with a teaching career of 35 years, has received the 2005 Sanford N. McDonnell Lifetime of Service Award in recognition of his contributions as a teacher and author of several books in the field of character education.

Mr. Urban received the award in Atlanta at a national forum on character education hosted by the Character Education Partnership, a coalition of companies, organizations and individuals whose stated goal is to foster the growth of ethical, responsible and caring young people.

The CEP has headquarters in Washington, D.C., and was founded in 1993 by aircraft pioneer Sandy McDonnell, former chairman and CEO of the McDonnell-Douglas Corp.

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