Atlantic Philanthropies, the private foundation of retail titan Chuck Feeney, will spend nearly $200 million to establish a global fellowship program and a Britain-based supporting institute dedicated to finding solutions to inequality.
The commitment will be among the 34-year-old grant maker’s last. One of the most prominent spend-down foundations — those that aim to disburse all assets by a set date rather than give in perpetuity — Atlantic Philanthropies will conclude active grant making in 2016. It will cease operations entirely by 2020.
Christopher Oechsli, the foundation’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview with The Chronicle that he and his colleagues spent three years thinking about how best to knit together decades of grant making in areas including education, research and development, and health. The fellowship and the institute are meant as launching pads for up-and-coming leaders working in an array of fields who are committed to combating inequality and discrimination.
“There is a real satisfaction to handing off the baton,” Mr. Oechsli said. “There is a satisfaction to concluding the work and celebrating what Chuck set out to do.”
Education Programs
The new pledges include a $91 million grant to the London School of Economics and Political Science to create the Atlantic Fellows program at the university’s International Inequalities Institute, which opened last year. The fellowship is intended for researchers, educators, health professionals, entrepreneurs, artists, and government workers who want to find solutions to global equity challenges.
The foundation is also giving $106 million to establish the Atlantic Institute, to be run by the Rhodes Trust at the University of Oxford. The institute will serve as the central hub and convening body for alumni of the London School of Economics program and other Atlantic Philanthropies-backed fellowships.
Late last year, for example, Atlantic Philanthropies said it would give $177 million to establish a dementia-research center run by the University of California at San Francisco and Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and offering a two-year fellowship program at the respective institutions.
Another fellowship supported by the foundation focuses on improving access to quality health services in Southeast Asia.
While some of the details are still to be worked out, the institute will do things such as host conferences where fellowship alumni can share successes and failures with one another. The goal is to create sustained interaction among these leaders with an eye to reducing structural inequality around the globe, Mr. Oechsli said.
“This is really our focus,” he said. “It has been a challenge because there is never a shortage of great opportunities to invest in, but we have really made the decision that this is the strongest and best use of our resources.”
Duty Free Cash
Mr. Feeney, an Irish-American businessman who turned 85 last month, made his fortune in airport shopping as co-founder of a chain of duty-free stores. In 1982, he transferred the entirety of his ownership share in the company, now known as DFS Group, to Atlantic Philanthropies.
In the early years of his philanthropic career, Mr. Feeney avoided publicity, warning beneficiaries that if they revealed his identity he would cut off support. Friends and family describe him as frugal.
“Chuck doesn’t own a car, doesn’t own a house, has one pair of shoes, and a $15 dollar watch,” Harvey Dale, a former president of Atlantic Philanthropies, said in a 2010 documentary about Mr. Feeney.
In 2002, Mr. Feeney decided he would do all his giving in his lifetime, becoming a champion of an approach sometimes referred to as “giving while living.” Atlantic Philanthropies set 2016 as the bookend for active grant making. In 2011, Mr. Feeney became the 59th philanthropist to sign the Giving Pledge, a donor community created by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett in which participants commit to give at least half their wealth to charity. Mr. Feeney has said the pledge “didn’t go far enough” in what it required of signees.
Hot Debate
Mr. Feeney and Atlantic Philanthropies executives are not the only ones working under a deadline. Bill and Melinda Gates have ordered that their namesake foundation exhaust its assets within two decades of their deaths. The Raikes Foundation, founded by onetime Microsoft and Gates Foundation executive Jeff Raikes, has pledged to spend down its assets by 2038.
Still, the work of Atlantic Philanthropies is being closely watched as the value of spend-down foundations is hotly debated. Proponents like Mr. Oechsli argue that moving a large volume of money fast to address a specific problem can, when done right, be more effective than a long, slow drip of support. At an event at Stanford University in April, he said some donors want to see the good the money can engender during their life span. Those on the other side of the argument — foundations with standing endowments — say grant makers that give in perpetuity will be around to address needs that no one can foresee today.
For its part, Atlantic Philanthropies will have given away nearly $8 billion when it turns out the lights.
In some ways, what is happening there is much like what happens at any foundation when it has engaged in a project that is going to end, according to Mr. Oechsli. The difference in this case is that the shutdown cuts across all parts of the organization, from grant making to staffing. Atlantic Philanthropies currently has offices in Dublin, Bermuda, and New York, and in the coming year its staff of 44 people will be reduced by about one-third. At its biggest, the foundation had eight offices and 130 employees.
“I don’t think we are rushed,” Mr. Oechsli said of the work to close up shop. “I just think there is an intensity about these choices and decisions.”
