Pew partners with individuals, foundations and corporations that want their charitable investments to achieve significant and measurable returns. With more than six decades of experience, we are able to identify critical issues and offer a variety of approaches to donors who share our commitment to fact-based solutions and results-oriented philanthropy. When our projects can benefit from effective advocacy, we tap our government affairs expertise to advance policy.
Even before our country declared its independence, the transformational power of philanthropy was a strong force for change in the evolving American landscape.
With other resources generally scarce and a government thousands of miles away, civic participation became a cornerstone of the emerging society, and charity was one of the duties of an engaged citizenry. Probably the colonial who embodied this behavior best was Philadelphia’s favorite son, Benjamin Franklin, inventor, entrepreneur, patriot and philanthropist extraordinaire.
In addition to his many good works during his lifetime, Franklin left bequests to both Boston, where he was born, and Philadelphia, his adopted home. “I wish to be useful even after my death, if possible in forming and advancing other young men, that may be serviceable to their country,” he wrote. In fact, so farsighted was Franklin that his sense of personal service was the philanthropic model for many decades after his death.
In the 20th century, the nonprofit world in the United States benefited from two new governmental incentives: tax deductions for philanthropic contributions and an income tax law that exempted any corporation and association “organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific or educational purposes.” Even more important, individuals began to amass great wealth, which many used to serve the public good. Business titans such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller raised the bar for grant-making that was both strategic and on a scale without precedent.
Philanthropy matured in many other forms as well. In 1907, the first private family foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, was established, and exactly a century ago, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation’s first organization devoted to civil rights, was formed. In 1914, the first community foundation was created in Cleveland, leading the way for countless locally based charitable initiatives. Step by step, the American ideal of creating a “more perfect union” was being advanced through a melding of social activism and charity.
In 1948, members of the Pew family consolidated their individual personal charitable efforts by creating The Pew Memorial Foundation, known today as The Pew Charitable Trusts. The family believed that the entrepreneurial, collaborative, priority-based, results-oriented approaches that had served them well in other aspects of life could be applied to pressing societal issues. Thus was the foundation a social innovator from its first days. Early on, it launched a pioneering initiative to support historically black colleges and universities at a time when those institutions were incubating America’s civil rights movement.
On this bedrock of enterprise and accountability, the founders created an organization that continually could, and does, evaluate the best tools and approaches to address the challenges of the times. The decision in 2004 to transition Pew from a private foundation to a public charity—which extended our operating flexibility, opening new avenues of collaboration and innovation— represented an extension of this evolutionary thinking, and we are leveraging the change in new and exciting ways. As a public charity, we have significantly increased the number, types and breadth of partnerships we can undertake. As an organization with a stable financial footing and a 61-year reputation of sound, responsible social investing, we can be highly strategic in choosing those partnerships.
The results so far have been promising. In 2008, our partner initiatives helped secure the passage of several new federal laws, including a major foster-care reform package that will free a half-million children trapped in a bureaucratic morass and place them in safe, loving families. The year 2009 began with another notable success when President George W. Bush established three new marine national monuments that more than doubled the area of U.S. ocean protected as no-take reserves.
Through the life of an initiative, we constantly monitor our efforts to make sure they are on track to achieve our goals. Our partners value this unblinking focus on our strategy, our tailored approach to investing resources and our steadfast commitment to organizational accountability. In the Pew tradition, as we expand our partnership base, we seek to reach out to more constituencies—child advocates, consumers, voters—to help them carry their messages directly to policy makers at the local, state and federal levels.
Sixty-one years ago, the founders of The Pew Charitable Trusts did not pretend to presage the challenges that would face 21st-century America, much less specific ways to address them. Instead, they built an institution that could stand the test of time, both stalwart in its core values and innovative in meeting emerging demands. For Pew and our growing number of partners, it may be that this founding vision is the investment that has yielded the most consistent, and most significant, returns.
Susan A. Magill
Managing Director, Philanthropic Services and Government Relations
