Sharon Alpert, who led the Nathan Cummings Foundation for nearly five years and guided its commitment to place its roughly half billion dollar endowment in mission-based investments, has announced plans to leave the New York grant maker this month.
In a joint email from Alpert and Jaimie Mayer, Cummings’s board chair, Alpert said she was “transitioning to a new path to pursue social justice for people and planet.”
She did not provide plans and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Alpert previously served in leadership roles at the Surdna and Ford foundations.
Alpert joined Cummings in 2015 following the ouster of Simon Greer, who had clashed with the board over strategy.
Under Alpert’s leadership, in 2018 Cummings said it would invest all of its assets in companies that promise a social or environmental benefit in addition to shareholder returns.
In her statement today, Alpert praised Cummings for being “willing to change the status quo in philanthropy.”
Mayer listed a number of achievements with Alpert at the helm, including an increase in payout to support grassroots environmental and pro-democracy groups and artists, as well as her shareholder activism efforts to hold corporations to account. During the early days of the Trump administration, the Cummings Foundation said it would increase its payout rate from 5.75 percent of its assets to 6.75 percent for two years in response to threats it believed Trump posed to social-justice efforts.
Mayer said Alpert also led a revised strategy for its Israel grant making, and she praised Alpert’s work to help instill a commitment to philanthropy among the family foundation’s fourth generation of leaders. The foundation’s namesake, Nathan Cummings, founded the Sara Lee Corporation in 1939, and Mayer is the first fourth-generation family member to lead the foundation’s board.
‘Moral Clarity’
Mayer said that in the coming weeks the foundation will announce plans for a national search to replace Alpert.
Alpert is a board member of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. The group’s president, Aaron Dorfman, said he had not been given prior notice about Alpert’s planned departure from Cummings.
The foundation’s decision to devote 100 percent of its assets to impact investments was a “great signal” to other grant makers, Dorfman said. A decade ago, it was unusual for a large foundation to place more than 2 percent of its endowment in mission investments.
In addition to reallocating the endowment and boosting payout, Dorfman said, Alpert speaks with “moral clarity” on issues facing progressive grant makers, and her “Letters to the Field” provided powerful distillations of the challenges facing the country and the role foundations can play.
“Some other philanthropy will likely snatch her up quickly,” he said. “I hope she stays in the field for a long time.”
Alex Daniels covers foundations, donor-advised funds, fundraising research, and tax issues for the Chronicle. He recently wrote about philanthropy’s attempts to save democracy and about the termination of a partnership between Facebook and several foundations to study the effects of social media on democracy. Email Alex or follow him on Twitter .
