A Donor-advised Fund for Liberal Policy Reform
Campus protestor and student activist Drummond Pike took a position in 1970 at a youth group funded by the Ford Foundation. There he met philanthropists looking for ways to use Read more…
Refine Search Results
Search Results for:
Linking Law and Economics
The area where John Olin invested more donated resources than any other—the Law and Economics movement—was a matter of abiding personal interest for the philanthropist. Olin became persuaded that studying Read more…
Filer Commission Defends Private Giving
Public debate over the Tax Reform Act of 1969 stirred up some basic questions about and criticisms of the role of private philanthropy in America. Several public figures decided it Read more…
Feminist Flurry From the Ford Foundation
In 1972, Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy pledged “to investigate grantmaking possibilities in the area of women’s rights and opportunities.” Between that moment and the end of the 1970s, dedicated Read more…
Joe Coors Brews Up the Heritage Foundation
After backing Ronald Reagan’s Presidential bid in 1968, beer magnate Joseph Coors concluded that an intellectual infrastructure for shaping public policies was just as important as good candidates. Liberals already Read more…
An Explosion of Giving for Gay Advocacy
In 1970, RESIST, a Massachusetts-based funder that had supported draft resistance and opposition to the Vietnam War, awarded what is believed to be the first foundation grant to a gay Read more…
Environmental Lawsuits
Environmental conservation was a part of the Ford Foundation’s program as early as 1952, when it provided seed money to Resources for the Future to conduct economic research on nature Read more…
Ethnic-rights Lawsuits
Upon deciding to make a major push for black rights during the 1960s, the Ford Foundation started funding the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (see 1967 entry). It quickly Read more…
Carnegie Pushes a “G.I. Bill” for the Poor
In 1967, the Carnegie Corporation announced formation of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, headed by Clark Kerr, who had just been fired as president of the University of California Read more…
Race-rights Lawsuits
In 1967, the Ford Foundation decided to become a major funder of the civil-rights movement. By 1970 it was spending 40 percent of its grantmaking on minorities. Much of the Read more…
Ford Invents Advocacy Philanthropy
From the time of the Gilded Age—when many political and journalistic careers were built by taking shots at robber barons—wealthy donors and large foundations tended to be skittish about taking Read more…
Making a Case for Government Arts Spending
Founded by businessman Edward Filene in 1919, the Twentieth Century Fund (rechristened the Century Fund in 1999) shaped the course of arts philanthropy by sponsoring the work of Princeton University Read more…
A Report Card for Schools
As policymakers began to focus on improving the performance of public schools, they felt the need for accurate ways to track student achievement. In 1963, U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Read more…
Disarmament Lobbies
The arms control and disarmament movement is a product of philanthropy. The earliest influential donor was Andrew Carnegie, an internationalist and pacifist who felt sure that war could be banished Read more…
Putting Bail on a Scientific Footing
When Louis Schweitzer heard that a thousand boys had languished in a Brooklyn prison for at least ten months without trial, he was astonished and disappointed. Schweitzer, an immigrant from Read more…
Pierre Goodrich and the Liberty Fund
Pierre Goodrich was a successful Indianapolis businessman; as son of a former governor he had a deep interest in public affairs; and he loved to read the great classic books. Read more…
Law School Clinics Institutionalize Political Activism
Beginning in 1959, the Ford Foundation gradually established a network of law-school-based legal clinics that became a powerful tool of liberalism. Many professors resisted the effort at first, because the Read more…
Pastor Robinson Blazes a Path for the Peace Corps
Drawing on the long American tradition of religious missionary work abroad, Harlem minister James Robinson founded Operation Crossroads Africa with donated money in 1958. Several trips to Africa had convinced Read more…
Spawning Birth Control
Katharine McCormick had grown up in a prominent Chicago family, struggled through eight difficult years to become the second woman to graduate from MIT, then married the emotionally disturbed youngest Read more…
AEI Guards Free Enterprise
Founded in 1938 by a group of businessmen aiming to strengthen “free, competitive enterprise,” the American Enterprise Association had been only mildly effective when William Baroody arrived in 1954, quitting Read more…