Couple Give $500,000 to Alliance for Arts

A Thousand Oaks couple have donated $500,000 to the Alliance for the Arts and will have their names placed on a glistening reflecting pool at the Civic Arts Plaza.

Retired health care executive George H. Jones and homemaker and child advocate Diane Jones completed details of their donation Wednesday, after talking to the alliance for nearly a year.

“I’m just jumping up and down with excitement,” said Patricia Moore, executive director of the Alliance for the Arts, the nonprofit fund-raising arm of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. “They approached me in October about getting involved, but not at quite this generous level. I took them on a tour and I think Diane fell in love with the reflecting pool.”

The pool, which may eventually include a fountain if donations allow, sits between the city’s administrative offices, the Fred Kavli Theatre for the Performing Arts and City Hall’s conference center. On a clear day, it picks up the colors of the sky, hills and oaks in its shallow water.

The pool will be dubbed the G.H. and Diane Jones Reflecting Pool in honor of the couple, who have lived in Thousand Oaks for 14 years and have been season ticket-holders at the Civic Arts Plaza since it opened in 1994.

“Thousand Oaks has become our home,” the Joneses wrote in an alliance questionnaire. “The community has been very good to us, and we wanted to find a way to express our thanks in a way that can benefit all our neighbors. What better way than to help fund the arts?”

Diane Jones said part of her interest in donating to the arts stems from her late exposure to them growing up in Indiana and Arizona.

“Unfortunately, my first [theater] experience didn’t come until I was in high school,” she wrote. “I believe we need to introduce children to the arts as early as possible. I wish I had been provided the opportunity much earlier than I was!!”

The Joneses have two adult children and three grandchildren.

Their donation is the second major contribution to the alliance in the past few months. It brings the group within $2 million of its $15-million fund-raising goal for 1998.

Earlier this summer, Moorpark businessman Fred Kavli gave $2.5 million to the alliance and his name to the 1,800-seat Fred Kavli Theatre for the Performing Arts.