Clinton Foundation Makes Cuts Planned Before Election — but Not All

The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation will carry forth with several key changes readied last year in case Hillary Clinton was elected president, the organization’s leader, Donna Shalala, said Friday. But it will not adopt all the plans it made to trim back its work, such as refusing all money from foreign governments, something that will now be handled on a case-by-case basis, she said.

A number of questions remain unanswered, among them whether Hillary Clinton will rejoin the organization as a board member or in some other formal capacity. The organization is also considering new fundraising approaches after two years of fundraising declines.

Offering up an optimistic outlook for the organization after a bruising 18 months, Donna Shalala said a monthslong review process last year — in which President Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton were intimately involved — has made the Clinton Foundation “better focused and better positioned for the brave new world we are going into.”

Donations were down in 2016 compared to 2015. It “was a very challenging year,” said Ms. Shalala, in part because “we didn’t have the participation of the Clintons in fundraising for much of the year because they were obviously out on the political campaign.”

The Clinton Foundation did top a $20 million fundraising goal for unrestricted dollars in 2016, she said.

“We had a low fourth quarter, though on December 31 we saw some checks come in from people that we had never met before and did not know,” Ms. Shalala said.

The foundation has not yet disclosed total fundraising or revenue figures for 2016. (In recent years, the foundation has filed its Form 990 for the preceding calendar year in November or December.) Donations to the Clinton Foundation fell by more than a third in 2015 to about $100 million, although that was due at least in part to the way endowment-related gifts are recorded and the fact that it eased up on a major endowment fundraising push.

Old-Fashioned Fundraising

Ms. Shalala said the organization is considering new approaches to its fundraising. Without going into detail, she said she foresees a combination of things including events, direct mail, and “just plain old getting to know people that are interested in our work.”

When asked what would happen to the foundation’s work if fundraising numbers continued to fall this year, Ms. Shalala said that she does not expect contributions to slack off. Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton are once again a regular presence in the foundation’s offices.

“The president still has a lot of friends out there, and there are lots of people that want to support” the work of the foundation, she said.

The grant maker laid off about 100 people after it eliminated the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual meeting that gathered donors from around the world, Ms. Shalala said, but added that she does not anticipate any more staff cuts.

Obesity and Opioid Crisis

In a letter released Thursday, Bill Clinton detailed some of the changes in programs and operations at the organization. The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership and the Clinton Foundation’s work in Haiti are spinning off, he said. The former will operate as an independent organization, and the latter will be moved under Sean Penn’s J/P Haitian Relief Organization, with financial support from Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien’s Digicel Foundation. The CGI Haiti Action Network will continue.

He also highlighted the recent work of the Clinton Foundation to promote domestic and global health, protect the environment, improve education, and develop leaders. Priorities moving forward include fighting childhood obesity and the opioid epidemic, expanding early-childhood learning with its Too Small to Fail program, and helping small farmers in places including Tanzania under the Clinton Development Initiative.

A leadership program for college students called Clinton Global Initiative University will carry on, although two related programs, CGI and CGI America have been eliminated.

In 2016, the Clinton Foundation spent months formulating plans in case of a Hillary Clinton victory in the 2016 presidential election. By September, the Clintons and their staff had teed up next steps for some 90 percent of the charity’s operations and programs, which included spinning them off into stand-alone charities, handing them over to other organizations, or suspending them altogether.

While the Clintons wish the outcome of the election had been different, Mr. Clinton said, the work of the foundation will carry on.

“The attacks on our efforts have not come from people and organizations who understand or care about the work we do,” he said.

‘Weary of the Craziness’

When asked if there is anything she would have done differently in the last 18 months if given the chance, Ms. Shalala responded that she was sure she would but has not had time to reflect.

“I am used to being pounded on,” she said. “But everybody else is not. I think the challenges of the last 18 months were to keep organization together and focused. That is not easy when you don’t have control of the political environment or work environment in which you are working.”

It was hard, for example, to close down the Clinton Global Initiative, one of the organization’s most exciting programs, she said.

“I think we didn’t really miss a beat even though people grew weary of the craziness that was going on.”

She said she will remain at the helm of the organization for now. A veteran administrator and life-long friend of the Clintons, Ms. Shalala was tapped for the job in Spring 2015 as she stepped down as president of the University of Miami. She has steered more than one institution through rocky waters, building a decades-long track record as a steely and effective leader.

“My cup of tea is very complex situations and very complex institutions and helping people to kind of think through their strategies and working their way out of issues,” Ms. Shalala told The Chronicle in a 2015 interview.

But Ms. Shalala is 75 years old. She was briefly hospitalized after suffering a stroke on the final day of the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York in September 2015.

And it is possible the charity will need a different administrator with a different set of skills as it pushes forward.