Foundation Annual Reports

ROBERT STERLING CLARK FOUNDATION
135 East 64th Street
New York, N.Y. 10065
(212) 288-8900
http://www.rsclark.org

Period covered: Year ending October 31, 2006.

Purpose and areas of support: The foundation was established in 1952 by Robert Sterling Clark (1877-1956), an art collector and horse breeder who was an heir to the Singer sewing-machine fortune.

During its 2006 fiscal year, the foundation appropriated grants totaling $5,226,835, distributed among its three longstanding program areas as follows: Ensuring access to comprehensive reproductive-health information and services received 28 grants totaling $2,331,635; strengthening cultural institutions, 37 grants totaling $1,537,700; and improving the performance of public institutions in New York, 28 grants totaling $1,357,500.

Reproductive-health grants provide support to national and regional groups engaged in advocacy, grass-roots organizing, litigation, policy analysis, public education, and research. The program has several objectives, such as promoting policies and laws that enable women to have access to comprehensive information and services, including abortion and emergency contraception; disputing laws and legal decisions that undermine reproductive rights; developing new public-education messages based on current opinion research; and promoting school-based curricula that encompass comprehensive sexuality education.

For example, the Pro-Choice Public Education Project, in New York, received $70,000 to create and distribute reproductive-rights messages that use pop culture and current politics that would resonate with teenagers and young women.

The foundation’s cultural program reflects Robert Sterling Clark’s “lifelong love of art,” and today most grants emphasize projects that benefit the management and financial status of arts and cultural institutions in New York City. Specific activities include fund raising among individuals, joint marketing ventures, program assessment, strategic planning, and the use of effective accounting and reporting systems and technology.

In addition, the foundation makes a limited number of awards to help protect artistic freedom and to promote the role that both commercial and nonprofit arts ventures play in New York City’s economic development.

Arts grants included $50,000 to Poets & Writers to reconfigure its Web site, and $30,000 to the Irish Repertory Theatre to work with a consultant to cultivate support for the theater’s capital campaign among midlevel donors.

The premise of the foundation’s program on the performance of public institutions in New York City and State is that “government agencies and employees will deliver better services in a more cost-effective manner if their activities are examined, evaluated, and held up to public view.” Within this framework, the foundation emphasizes services that benefit vulnerable residents, including children in foster care, elderly people, homeless people, and families striving to move from welfare to work. It also makes some grants related to adequate education, land-use planning, and solid-waste management, as well as environmental policies that help ensure safe air and drinking water.

Grants included $60,000 to Environmental Defense for its work to curtail air pollution and traffic congestion from trucks transporting garbage from Manhattan into the city’s outer boroughs.

Also in 2006, the foundation supported the production of various publications, including a report by Advocates for Children of New York that examines how schools in the city often fail to meet the needs of homeless children.

Application procedure: Detailed guidelines on applying, including what information should be included in the proposal package, are available on the foundation’s Web site. The Board of Directors meets in January, April, July, and October, and proposals are received and reviewed year-round.

Key officials: Margaret C. Ayers, president and chief executive officer; Darcy Hector and Laura Wolff, program officers; Winthrop R. Munyan, chairman of the Board of Directors.

WILLIAM AND FLORA HEWLETT FOUNDATION
2121 Sand Hill Road
Menlo Park, Calif. 94025
(650) 234-4500
http://www.hewlett.org

Period covered: Year ending December 31, 2006.

Purpose and areas of support: William R. Hewlett, who founded the Hewlett-Packard Company in 1939 with David Packard, created the foundation in 1966 with his first wife, Flora Lamson Hewlett, and his eldest son, Walter B. Hewlett.

When the elder Mr. Hewlett passed away in January 2001, he left much of his estate to the foundation, catapulting it into its current position as the fourth-largest foundation in the country. The fund is independent of the Hewlett-Packard Company and any of its associated charitable programs.

In 2006, the foundation made $211,762,058 in grant payments and awarded new grants totaling $292,040,335 in the following program areas: population, which received $64,523,868; the environment, $62,128,305; education, $48,079,100; the performing arts, $41,322,180; global development, $36,307,021; regional grants in California’s San Francisco Bay Area and Central Valley, $7,991,000; and philanthropy, $5,972,025. Hewlett also awarded “special projects” grants totaling $25,716,836.

(By 2007, allocations had risen substantially, as the foundation awarded grants totaling $483,654,925 in grants and paid out grants totaling $426,384,396.)

During 2006 the foundation’s population program began an effort to reduce unwanted pregnancies in the United States, undertook research and training efforts to evaluate the effects of population and family planning and reproductive health on economic development, supported programs designed to “connect the dots” between reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, and worked to expand access to reproductive-health technologies it considers underused, including emergency contraception and intrauterine devices. International efforts focus on the poorest regions of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.

The environment program emphasizes three goals: protecting critical ecosystems and landscapes in western North America; creating diverse constituencies in California that endorse environmental-protection efforts in the state; and encouraging energy efficiency, renewable energy sources, and transportation systems that can help curtail heavy reliance on fossil fuels. International projects are concentrated in Brazil, China, and Mexico.

The foundation joined with various partners as part of its four-year, $32-million Climate Change Initiative, which advocates comprehensive federal action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

Education grants stressed efforts to restructure kindergarten-through-12th-grade education in California, improve achievement in urban classrooms in high-poverty areas, make high-quality academic materials widely available on the Internet, and strengthen California’s community colleges.

In November 2006, the foundation made grants totaling $25-million to four Bay Area performing-arts institutions — the American Conservatory Theater, the San Francisco Ballet, the San Francisco Opera, and the San Francisco Symphony — to commemorate the foundation’s 40th year of arts-related grant making.

The foundation began its global-development program in 2005, and grants focus on wide-ranging efforts to eliminate barriers to equitable growth in developing nations. In December 2006, Hewlett joined with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to commit at least $60-million over three years to help improve primary and secondary education in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

The education, environment, and performing-arts programs are currently accepting unsolicited letters of inquiry for new grants, while the global-development, philanthropy, and population programs are not.

In his “President’s Statement,” Paul Brest explores the role that information technology and other tools can play in “capturing, distributing, and ultimately using better information to make better philanthropic decisions.”

Application procedure: Detailed guidelines are available on the foundation’s Web site.

Key officials: Paul Brest, president; Susan Bell, vice president and program director, philanthropy and regional grants; Laurance R. Hoagland Jr., vice president and chief investment officer; Eric Brown, director of communications; Carolyn Provost, director of grants administration; Walter B. Hewlett, chairman of the Board of Directors.

Program directors: Moy Eng (performing arts); Hal Harvey (environment); Sara Seims (population); Smita Singh (global development); Marshall (Mike) Smith (education).

HOUSTON ENDOWMENT
600 Travis, Suite 6400
Houston, Tex. 77002
(713) 238-8100
http://www.houstonendowment.org

Period covered: Year ending December 31, 2006.

Purpose and areas of support: After donating more than $1-million during their first years of marriage to benefit Houston institutions, Jesse H. Jones (1874-1956) and his wife, Mary Gibbs Jones (1872-1962), endowed the foundation in 1937 to formalize their charitable giving.

Mr. Jones was a Houston-based financier and a developer of commercial real estate who also served in various civic and political positions, including chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the Great Depression and as U.S. secretary of commerce under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The endowment primarily makes grants for projects to benefit residents of Harris County — where Houston is located — and of seven nearby counties: Brazoria, Chambers, Fort Bend, Galveston, Liberty, Montgomery, and Waller.

In 2006, it awarded $71,940,190, up from $64,667,464 in 2005, through seven program areas: education, which received 30 percent of grant dollars; health, 20 percent; human services, 17 percent; community enhancement, 11 percent; the environment, 10 percent; the arts, 9 percent; and neighborhood development, 3 percent.

The education program stresses efforts to prepare students for college, to enhance students’ academic success at community and open-admission colleges, and to recruit, prepare, and retain highly qualified teachers. The largest award was $10-million to Project Yes, in Houston, to expand its public charter schools in metropolitan Houston that help prepare low-income minority students to succeed at four-year colleges.

Also that year, the Jesse H. Jones and Mary Gibbs Jones Scholarship Program made awards totaling $3,910,500 to 322 seniors attending Harris County high schools. Each scholarship provides $12,000, which the recipients may apply toward tuition at any accredited four-year college or university.

Health grants were up substantially over the previous year, and emphasized projects to increase health-care access for disadvantaged people, promote disease prevention and healthy lifestyles, and assist people with mental-health and behavioral problems. Allocations included $1-million to the Memorial Hermann Foundation, in Houston, to purchase a new helicopter to transport critically ill or injured patients, and $70,000 to Fundación Latino Americana Contra El Sida, also in Houston, to provide culturally appropriate HIV-prevention classes for Hispanic teenagers and young adults in Harris County.

The human-service program concentrates on projects designed to meet basic human needs, provide youth-development services, assist people with disabilities or chronic illnesses, curb child abuse and domestic violence, and aid homeless and elderly people.

For example, the Greater Houston Community Foundation received $100,000 for a program to increase the adoption of children currently in foster care, and the Arc of Fort Bend County, in Sugar Land, received $25,000 to develop a legal-guardianship and money-management program for people with developmental disabilities.

Application procedure: Detailed information is available on the foundation’s Web site.

Key officials: Larry R. Faulkner, president; Sheryl L. Johns, executive vice president; Anna B. Leal, grant director; George V. Grainger, senior grant officer and director of research and planning; Ann T. Hamilton, senior grant officer; Matthew C. Barnes, Debbie A. McNulty, M.A. Toni Moreno, and Leslie Chandler Wang, grant officers; Harriet W. Garland, E. Jane Kennedy, and Sharie Wood, grant managers; Peggy J. Howell, controller; Laurence E. Simmons, chairman of the Board of Directors.