Arnold Foundation Leader Vows Risk-Taking Grants and Steady Focus

Laura and John Arnold Foundation

The Laura and John Arnold Foundation has promoted an insider, Kelli Rhee, to serve as its president.

Ms. Rhee, 40, served as executive vice president and chief strategy officer at the Houston grant maker, which she joined nearly four years ago. Her past positions include stints as a consultant with Bain & Company and the Bridgespan Group.

The Arnold Foundation, which made about $106 million in grants in 2015, picked Ms. Rhee to replace Denis Calabrese, who left in January. The foundation, created by John Arnold, a former energy trader at Enron, and his wife, Laura, a lawyer, lists about $1.78 billion in assets.

The couple have signed the Giving Pledge.

Over the past year, Ms. Rhee led an effort to refine the Arnold Foundation’s strategy.

In an interview Tuesday, she said there was no “about-face” from the foundation’s plan to support efforts to reduce crime and ensure the criminal-justice system is fair, improve school performance, create sustainable public finance systems, and improve the reliability of scientific research so it can better inform philanthropy decisions and public-policy choices.

The foundation will continue to take its cues from Laura and John Arnold who, Ms. Rhee said, “are unafraid of taking on special interests head-on.”

“We feel there is a role for us as a philanthropy to take on issues that seem risky,” she said. “We are not afraid.”

Some of the foundation’s work, such as investigating changes in how workers’ pensions are funded, have threatened longstanding labor-union priorities. The grant maker has taken on the pharmaceutical industry by pushing for drug pricing based on performance rather than volume and has challenged academics by asking whether peer-reviewed journals are rigorous and transparent enough.

Surveillance Program

The Arnolds have also courted controversy through a gift they gave personally through the Baltimore Community Foundation to test the use of high-altitude aerial surveillance to solve crimes. In September, the billionaires also made a personal gift of $5 million to help survivors of Hurricane Harvey.

In all of its work, the foundation will continue to emphasize the use of data to inform funding decisions. But, Ms. Rhee said, the numbers-heavy approach doesn’t mean the foundation will only put money toward a sure thing.

“We don’t use data and evidence to minimize failure,” she said. “We don’t use it as a tool to avoid making mistakes. We use it as a tool to know where we should do more and where we should redirect” the foundation’s efforts.

Over the course of the past year, since Donald Trump was elected president, many foundation leaders have taken an adversarial approach as they’ve seen the new administration present challenges to their work, particularly as it relates to immigration, the environment, and civil rights.

Ms. Rhee stressed that the foundation is not ideological. To succeed in its work, she said, it will continue to look for partners in government, among nonprofits, and in the private sector that want to develop approaches based on research and the evaluation of data.

Said Ms. Rhee: “That kind of approach works regardless of what’s happening politically.”