The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced Friday that Larry Kramer will step down as head of the $13 billion grant maker at the end of the year to lead the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has served as president of the California grant maker, which is one of the 10 wealthiest foundations in the United States, for 11 years.
Kramer has won praise for seeing problems like climate change, cybersecurity, and threats to democracy well ahead of other philanthropists —and tackling them — and for sharing information about what Hewlett was learning so that it could help other grant makers become more effective.
“I am grateful for the opportunity I have had to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems — the existential threat of climate, challenges to democracy, and persistent inequity,” Kramer said in a statement. “As I have seen and learned at Hewlett, philanthropy at its best — open, patient, collaborative — is a force for good to help make the world a better place.” (Hewlett is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
Under Kramer’s leadership Hewlett established itself as a leading climate-change grant maker, giving $216 million in clean energy and environmental grants in 2022 alone. The foundation also continued to make large investments in other areas, such as reproductive health and rights, the arts, and projects in the San Francisco Bay area, that have been a big part of the foundation’s focus since technology entrepreneur William Hewlett and his wife, Flora, established their philanthropy in 1966.
During Kramer’s tenure, Hewlett has also branched out into new areas. Two years after his arrival, Hewlett created two $150 million efforts, one to promote cybersecurity and the other, the Madison Initiative, a seven-year push to improve democracy by strengthening Congress as an institution, combating misinformation, and making changes to how elections are financed.
More recently, in 2022, Hewlett put $50 million toward an academic effort to “reimagine capitalism” and in 2020 made a 10-year, $180 million commitment to racial justice.
In announcing the racial-equity commitment, Kramer wrote that racism was “literally baked into the system” in ways that are clear, like instances of police abuse and the structure of public education and through “hidden subtleties” coded to language, dress, and expectations about behavior.
“The ‘business as usual’ that has permitted this all to persist must end,” Kramer wrote. “As a foundation that has not traditionally focused on racial justice, we undertake this work with intentionality tempered by humility. We know we have hard work ahead and much still to learn — from each other, from our peers and partners, and from those whose lived experience is different from ours.”
Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said he and Kramer consulted with each other regularly before making big grant-making decisions. He said Kramer’s departure was a huge loss for philanthropy. (The Ford Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
“He operates from a position of candor, frankness, and authenticity that is inspiring, and that is not always the case in philanthropy,” Walker said.
Walker credited Kramer with predicting the need to respond to threats to democracy in the United States and for his role in highlighting the dangers of cyberattacks. He said that Kramer’s commitment to racial justice was genuine and rooted in scholarship rather than activism or personal experience.
“It helps to have racial justice rooted in both activism and the rigor of evidence,” Walker said. “And Larry always favors evidence and rigor and evidence in approach.”
Taking Risks
Philanthropy experts who worked with Kramer, including Daniel Stid, who led the foundation’s Madison Initiative, say he established high standards but allowed staff members to take risks and didn’t micromanage.
Kramer was “extremely foresighted” in recognizing that political polarization was fast becoming a threat to U.S. Democracy when he set up the Madison Initiative, said Stid, who is now executive director of Lyceum Labs, a center-right think tank.
“That was three years before Donald Trump came on the scene,” he said. “It wasn’t a response to Trump, but it was anticipating that our democracy was headed in the wrong direction.”
Throughout all of Hewlett’s grant making, Kramer sought to inform his peers in philanthropy, nonprofit leaders, academe, and the broader public about what motivated the foundation to take action. Reflecting a desire to be transparent, Kramer often wrote detailed blog posts to show readers the gears and levers behind Hewlett’s grant making.
“His modus operandi is to share his thinking, even at the early stage” of a project, Stid said. “More than most philanthropic leaders, he has an appreciation for the power of ideas and a knack for expressing them in ways that are really powerful and influential.”
‘Ahead of His Time’
Fay Twersky, who led Hewlett’s effective-philanthropy effort for nearly a decade before becoming president of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, said Kramer’s new role at the London School of Economics is a perfect place for him, given Hewlett’s work looking for economic frameworks that can supplant free-market orthodoxy as the dominant approach.
At Hewlett, Twersky said, Kramer had a knack for seeing “around the corner” and identifying emerging challenges where the foundation could make a difference. For instance, sensing that cyberattacks were becoming a dangerous threat, he discontinued the foundation’s support of nuclear disarmament and nuclear power, which had always been envisioned as a time-limited strategy, to focus on cybercrime and misinformation.
“He was at the leading edge of suggesting that foundations could play a role in developing policy frameworks for cybersecurity that would kind of serve as a public good,” she said. “He was really ahead of his time.”
Kramer is not new to the academic world. He came to Hewlett after serving as dean of the Stanford Law School.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Hewlett’s board chair, said in a statement that the foundation will “immediately” start a search for Kramer’s replacement and that it is committed to all of its existing grant-making areas.
