Annie E. Casey Foundation
The Annie E. Casey Foundation was established in 1948 by Jim Casey, one of the founders of United Parcel Service, along with his two brothers and his sister, in honor of their mother. What started as a foundation devoted to supporting child welfare and long-term foster care, has refocused, over the decades, into an organization emphasizing multiculturalism and race-based programs for minorities. The Casey Foundation favors the presence of a large, centralized government exercising control over the health care services, employment, and personal incomes of American citizens. To influence policymakers, program administrators, the news media, and other audiences in supporting innovations it regards as progressive, the Foundation led a consortium of philanthropies that provided funds to the Urban Institute for a comprehensive, nonpartisan research project called Assessing the New Federalism. Its findings confirmed the Casey Foundation's belief that adequate incomes and child care arrangements are best ensured by increased government spending and an expansion of federal welfare bureaucracy.
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Arca Foundation
The Arca Foundation was established in 1952 as the Nancy Reynolds Bagley Foundation by Nancy Susan Reynolds, whose father founded the R. J. Reynolds tobacco company. In 1968, the Foundation changed its name to Arca (Italian for "ark" - to evoke an image of "something that affords protection and safety"). It was around this time that Arca, like many other U.S. foundations, took a decidedly left turn, beginning to earmark grants for radical environmentalism. In the 1980s, funding for pro-Cuba, pro-Sandinista, and anti-corporate groups emerged as additional priorities.
Sources: Discover the Network
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Carnegie Foundation
Andrew Carnegie, the famous Scottish steel baron from Pittsburgh, established his Foundation in 1911 primarily to promote the "advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding." He believed that the wealthy had a moral obligation to give away their fortunes for projects that would benefit society at large, keeping for themselves only what was needed to support their own families. During his lifetime, he donated some $56 million to build 2,509 libraries in the English-speaking world. All told, he personally gave away over $350 million. During the past few decades, the political leanings of the Carnegie Corporation have shifted leftward. Today CC believes that its mission is to serve as a catalyst for social change of a leftist nature. One notable individual who served on the Carnegie Board of Directors until recently was Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of Senator John Kerry.
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Ford Foundation
When Henry Ford II eventually resigned from the Foundation's Board of Trustees in 1977, he expressed his profound disgust with how the institution and most of its trustees had drifted so radically to the political left over time. The Ford Foundation is a longtime supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union, as evidenced by its $7 million grant to the ACLU in 1999. "The ACLU has no better partner and friend than the Ford Foundation," said the ACLU's then-Executive Director Ira Glasser. "It is fitting that the largest single gift...ever to the ACLU, should come from Ford." The Ford Foundation is a member organization of both the Peace and Security Funders Group (which supports anti-war and radical environmentalist groups) and the International Human Rights Funders Group (a network of more than six-dozen grantmakers dedicated to funding leftwing causes). One of the Ford Foundation's most notable disbursements was its 1968 "seed grant" to create the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), an open borders group that is now the most influential Hispanic advocacy organization in the United States. Between 1970 and 2005, Ford gave more than $25 million to MALDEF; nearly half of that amount ($11,285,000) was donated between 2000 and 2004.
Sources: Discover the Network, Wikipedia, Answers.com, Microsoft Encarta, Columbia Encyclopedia, SourceWatch.org, OpenSecrets.org
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Joyce Foundation
Beatrice Joyce Kean established the Joyce Foundation in 1948 after accumulating hundreds of millions of dollars in the lumber industry (via family-owned timberlands, plywood and saw mills, and wholesale and retail building-material distribution facilities). During her lifetime, most of Ms. Kean's modestly small philanthropic gifts were to apolitical recipients such as hospitals and health organizations. After her death in 1972, a professional staff took control of the Foundation and began to move it toward the political left. At first, universities and cultural institutions were added to its roster of grant recipients. A few years later, radical environmentalist and conservation groups entered the picture, as eventually did organizations dedicated to social justice, prison reform, and increased funding for government and social services, particularly for minorities. A notable recent member of the Joyce Foundation's Board of Directors was Barack Obama, who ran successfully as the Democratic candidate for an Illinois Senate seat in 2004.
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Lear Family Foundation
The Lear Family Foundation was established by Norman Lear, a longtime producer, director, comedy writer, screenwriter, political and social activist, and philanthropist who created People for the American Way and served as the Board President of the American Civil Liberties Foundation of Southern California for more than twenty years. Through his Foundation, Lear supports many leftist causes and organizations. According to a Proteus Fund spokeswoman, the Lear Family Foundation is a private program of the Proteus Fund. Of the $6,309,104 in grants received by the Lear Family Foundation in 2002, the Proteus Fund supplied fully $6,303,077. Norman Lear personally gave the other $6,027.
Sources: Discover the Network, ActivistCash.com
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National Education Association
The National Education Association (NEA) is the largest professional employee organization in the U.S. It represents teachers and other workers involved in education - at levels pre-school through university graduate programs. With 3.2 million members, the NEA is larger than the American Federation of Teachers which has about 1.4 million members. The NEA lobbies Congress and federal agencies on behalf of its teachers and public schools in general.
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Open Society Institute
Established in 1993, the Open Society Institute (OSI) is the most prominent of the numerous foundations belonging to the international billionaire financier George Soros, its founder and Chairman. A strong supporter of anti-war and environmentalist organizations, OSI is a member of the Peace and Security Funders Group. It is also a member of the International Human Rights Funders Group, a network of more than six-dozen grant-makers dedicated to bankrolling leftist organizations and causes. OSI endorsed a 2000 document called the Earth Charter, which blames capitalism for many of the world's environmental, social, and economic problems. OSI was a signatory to a November 1, 2001 document characterizing the 9/11 attacks as a legal matter to be addressed by criminal-justice procedures rather than military retribution. Suggesting that the hijackers were motivated chiefly by a desire to point out global injustices perpetrated by the United States, this document explained that similar future calamities could be averted only if America would finally begin to "promote fundamental rights around the world." Numerous OSI funding initiatives reflect the Institute's view that the American criminal-justice system is infested with racism, and that incarceration is an inappropriate punishment for most lawbreakers. A strong advocate of gun control, OSI funds the Network on Small Arms, which has lobbied the United Nations to pass a measure outlawing private gun ownership and effectively overturning the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment. On August 16, 2005, OSI launched a new organization called the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN). Led by Democratic activists David Sirota and Steve Doherty, PLAN's mission is to seed state legislatures with prewritten "model" legislation reflecting leftist visions of justice. Between 1998 and 2003, OSI received more than $30 million from U.S. government agencies. Various State Department documents indicate that OSI has been paid to run what the Department describes as "democratization programs" in a number of countries, including Uzbekistan, Burma, and regions of Central Asia.
Sources: Discover the Network, Wikipedia, Answers.com, SourceWatch.org, OpenSecrets.org
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Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) was established in 1913 by John D. Rockefeller, Sr., who amassed a vast fortune as the founder and developer of the Standard Oil Company. The Rockefeller Foundation is a member of the Peace and Security Funders Group, an association of individual philanthropists and foundations that give money to anti-war and environmentalist organizations. RF is also a member of the International Human Rights Funders Group, a network of more than six-dozen grantmakers dedicated to funding leftwing groups and causes. In RF's estimation, the United States is a nation rife with longstanding, ineradicable racial inequities.
Sources: Discover the Network, Wikipedia, Answers.com, Microsoft Encarta, Columbia Encyclopedia, SourceWatch.org
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Tides Foundation
Established in 1976 by California-based activist Drummond Pike, the Tides Foundation was set up as a public charity that receives money from donors and then funnels it to the recipients of their choice. Because many of these recipient groups are quite radical, the donors often prefer not to have their names publicly linked with the donees. By letting the Tides Foundation, in effect, “launder” the money for them and pass it along to the intended beneficiaries, donors can avoid leaving a “paper trail.” Such contributions are called "donor-advised," or donor-directed, funds. Through this legal loophole, nonprofit entities can also create for-profit organizations and then funnel money to them through Tides -- thereby circumventing the laws that bar nonprofits from directly funding their own for-profit enterprises. The Tides Foundation promotes a multitude of leftist agendas. Among the crusades to which Tides contributes are: radical environmentalism; the anti-war movement; anti-free trade campaigns; the banning of firearms ownership; abolition of the death penalty; access to government-funded abortion-on-demand; and radical gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender advocacy. The Foundation is also a member organization of the International Human Rights Funders Group, a network of more than six-dozen grantmakers dedicated to finaning leftwing groups and causes. Surprisingly, the Tides Foundation and Tides Center also receive grants from the U.S. federal government.
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Woods Fund
The Woods Fund focused on welfare reform, affordable housing, the quality of public schools, race and class disparities in the juvenile justice system, and tax policy as a tool in reducing poverty. The Fund supported the concept of an expanding welfare state allocating ever-increasing amounts of money to the public school system, and the redistribution of wealth via taxes. A notable Woods board member is William Ayers, who in the 1960s was a member of the terrorist group Weatherman, and was a wanted fugitive for over a decade as a result of the group's bombing campaign; today Ayers is a Professor of Education at the University of Illinois. In 2002 the Woods Fund made a grant to Northwestern University Law School's Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers' wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was employed. Barack Obama was one of Ayers' fellow Woods Fund board members at that time. A former President of the Woods Fund was Maria G. Valdez, a member of the Regional Council of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the most influential Hispanic advocacy group in the United States. The Woods Fund's philanthropic agendas are focused in three program areas: 1) The Community Organizing program finances the formation of grassroots organizations, staffed mostly by volunteers, that attempt to shape public policy through activism; 2) The Arts and Culture program supports those who combine artistic pursuits with leftwing activism in the form of community organizing; 3) The Public Policy program supports "policy and constituency-building work that helps low-income individuals and families to attain higher standards of living," and aims to address "issues of poverty among low-wage workers as well as unskilled potential workers." Woods Fund philanthropy is founded on the axiom that there are "structural barriers to job opportunities, job retention and job advancement" that harm the "working poor." The Fund also condemns what it considers discrimination directed against those "having prison records or felony convictions that make it difficult for them to enter the workforce."
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