"Your Agenda Is Making Houston Better." How the Houston Endowment Backs Its Home City
/
Public parks are one area of focus for the endowment. Photo: Nate Hovee/shutterstock
I went to college in Houston in the late 1980s and was surprised to find a world-class arts scene that dramatically eclipsed the offerings of my hometown, Detroit. Down there in the muggy Gulf Coast south, Houston had a thriving opera, ballet and symphony, a professional theater, a chamber music group and the excellent Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). I stayed on after graduation, landing a job as the arts reporter for the city’s NPR affiliate. Houston, then the nation’s fifth-largest city, had the listener support and cultural offerings to keep a radio arts reporter employed.
This July, I took my son on a road trip to Houston this July for a fine art fix. (Yes, we went from L.A. to Houston to get some culture.) Now, with an eye out for philanthropy’s role in the development and character of cities, I recognized one major factor in Houston’s outstanding arts scene: the Houston Endowment. Founded in 1937 by Jesse H. Jones and his wife Mary Gibbs Jones, the Houston Endowment has given nearly $2 billion over the past 87 years and seeks to make Houston a vibrant city offering everyone the opportunity to thrive.
This perpetual, place-based, private foundation is large; its endowment is currently about $2.4 billion. It is also unusual in its open-ended mandate and its early focus on public-private partnerships. Although it isn’t a community foundation per se, its local impact has been profound. Over the decades, it has had a hand in shaping the city’s character, and as I saw in July, its reach can be seen everywhere you turn, literally.
Our first stop was the MFAH to see an impressionist and post-impressionist exhibition. Now the nation’s fourth-largest city and closing in on Chicago for third, Houston’s arts scene continues to flourish. The MFAH, now with a 70,000-piece collection, has tripled in size, expanding from its original, elegant curved-front space into three multistory buildings connected by underground tunnels. Looking up at a list of major benefactors carved into a marble wall, we saw at the very top: Houston Endowment.
After lunch, we hurried from the Museum District to nearby Rice Village to catch a matinee performance of a Noel Coward play at Main Street Theater, a community theater that now has two locations. Among the list of benefactors: Houston Endowment. Later, we caught an Agatha Christie play at the 774-seat main stage of the Alley Theatre, a decades-old, professional Actor’s Equity theater with a resident company. Among the benefactors: Houston Endowment. That night, we looked out the window of our room in the historic Lancaster Hotel and saw, across the street, the white Italian marble walls of Jones Hall, home of the Houston Symphony, built and donated by the Houston Endowment in 1966.
The Houston Endowment's efforts are also visible in what you don’t see — namely, homeless encampments. The Houston Endowment was a player in the city’s noteworthy turnaround of its homelessness problem, a project that moved 25,000 people into permanent housing, as explained in this excellent story in the New York Times. Houston is now a leader among cities for its success and continued efforts to house the homeless.
Honoring a founder’s vision
Jesse Jones set up the endowment with a broad mission: benefit the people of greater Houston, deal with important issues, and leverage its dollars. But the staff and board have the leeway to pursue that vision how they see fit. “If you invented a founder, you would invent Jesse Jones,” said Ann Stern, president and CEO of the Houston Endowment. “It’s really fun and important for us that everyone who comes to the foundation gets to know him. We all feel this real pressure to make him proud, to honor his legacy by having an impact in greater Houston.”
Stern, a native Houstonian, came to the Houston Endowment 11 years ago from Texas Children’s Hospital, where she most recently served as executive vice president. I met Stern and some of her staff at the endowment’s new, two-story office space adjacent to Spott’s Park, near Buffalo Bayou, in the shadow of downtown.
The building houses the endowment’s 40-member staff and is filled with standout work by local artists, including, over the receptionist’s desk, a large black painting by Rick Lowe, founder of Project Row Houses. The first floor houses the endowment’s three main programs — arts and parks, education and civic engagement — and an open conference space with movable walls. The endowment moved from its former downtown home to this new space in part to allow it to host meetings and be more accessible and closer to the community.
Like Stern, everyone I spoke to at the endowment wanted to talk about Jones. Jesse Jones moved to Houston from Tennessee when he was 24. He worked as a businessman, Democratic politician and real estate developer, and served as United States Secretary of Commerce from 1940 to 1945. He helped raise funds needed to get a federal grant to build the Houston Ship Channel, a feat that turned this inland city into a port. “It was one of the first public-private partnerships in the country, and we look to that as an example today,” said Stephanie Getman, director of communications.
But Jones only had an eighth-grade education, which he regretted. When he and Mary turned to philanthropy, many of their early gifts went toward individual scholarships and universities. By the 1950s, the endowment was making grants to schools in the $1 million range, including to my alma mater, the University of Houston.
Partnering to improve the city
Stern sees the endowment’s leadership in public-private partnerships as both a way to adhere to Jones’s vision and as basic good math. “Every single issue we care about and focus on at the Houston Endowment — the hard issues — the real dollars are in the public systems,” she said.
Take education. The endowment’s 2023 spend across all programs is projected to be $111 million. “That is going to be less than the fuel for the school buses for HISD. There is a little hyperbole there, but their annual budget is almost as big as our endowment. Or look at how much money is in the hospital systems. Our dollars are like this” — Stern made a tiny pinching gesture — “We can’t fill in dollars to correct bad policy. Often, our highest and best use is to give discretionary dollars to a public system that wants to figure out how to use its dollars more wisely.”
The endowment has funded strategic planning projects for HISD over the years. It also has given grants to the Buffalo Bayou Partnership for strategic planning around developing the bayou into parks, and to the Houston Parks Board. Funding strategic planning can spark important action, Stern said. With its plan, the parks board was able to attract other funders and generate a ballot initiative to raise money. “It helped them make the case because they had a plan.”
The Way Home
Stern helped establish the endowment’s current focus on arts and parks, education and civic engagement when she took the lead 11 years ago. But the endowment also does “opportunistic” funding, she said. “Sometimes, we see a major issue that has been intractable, and all of a sudden, something starts to change in the equation, and there is an opportunity.”
One example: homelessness. About 10 years ago, the endowment was considering giving up on funding local homeless efforts. Then the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development identified Houston as one of 10 cities that needed serious help with its homelessness problem, a distinction that came with access to federal dollars and support from a homelessness expert. “This is a prize you don’t want to win,” Stern said, “but the mayor was very committed to it and went about it in a very smart way.”
The mayor at the time, Annise Parker, had a personal connection to the issue because she and her wife, Kathy Hubbard, had adopted three girls out of the foster care system and a boy who had been living on the streets. (Parker was the first openly gay mayor of a major city in the U.S.)
Mayor Parker invited Stern to sit on an advisory panel, which included leaders from the business community, churches and synagogues, civic groups and nonprofits. They agreed to work together and put their resources behind a housing-first program called The Way Home. The endowment was adamant in its commitment to the initiative. It encouraged its grantees working in the homeless space to get on board with The Way Home, and made it clear that it would phase out funding for those that didn’t. It eventually contributed $30 million over the course of 10 years. In 2023, the endowment announced four new grants to fight homelessness totaling $15 million.
The Way Home focused first on housing veterans and the chronically homeless, an effort that has been largely successful. We saw a handful of homeless people on our visit, but not many. Downtown, now called the Skyline District — a hilariously apt diminution of the importance of a central business core — was spotless and nearly silent on a Saturday night.
Local knowledge and leverage
Like many regional and place-based philanthropies, the endowment also leverages its local knowledge to make change and often partners in those efforts with national foundations. For instance, when the Ford Foundation launched its America’s Cultural Treasures initiative, designed to lift up cultural organizations around the country during and after COVID, it offered $5 million in regional matching grants to benefit BIPOC organizations in a number of locales. Houston Endowment matched that number and worked to raise $2 million more from the city’s other leading philanthropies, including the Kinder, Brown, Cullen and Powell foundations, for a total of $12 million. As a result, Houston’s BIPOC Arts Network and Fund launched in 2021.
The endowment also leverages its connections, independence and good reputation to bring local groups together. “There are very few institutions that aren’t perceived as having an agenda. I think people look at us and say, ‘Your agenda is making Houston better.’ That’s an asset that we want to steward as carefully as we steer the dollars,” Stern said. “We can be a way to bridge a gap among people who don’t agree on things.”
“You cannot be a great city without world-class arts and parks"
Founder Jesse Jones also wanted Houston to be an outstanding center for the performing arts. Jones Hall is one manifestation of this goal, as are all the institutions I visited. Today, the endowment focuses mostly on small and mid-sized arts organizations and major ones making big shifts or upgrades.
“There is something about the arts that really feels like we’re celebrating who we are. People come to Houston from many different places, with many different backgrounds and perspectives,” Stern said. “One in three people are foreign-born in Houston. There is this real mix and diversity that I think Houstonians in general are proud of, and a real sense of welcoming. The arts bring people together and you just feel that.”
Stern sees the development of public parks as a similar celebration of diversity and shared experience — and part of what makes Houston a world-class city. “These are not just ‘nice to haves.’ You cannot be a great city without world-class arts and parks, and here in Houston, it has to be diverse. It’s about who we are as a region and a city, how much we care about each other and what we value. The arts and the parks are shared experiences that connect us.”
I have always been a champion of Houston’s unity among diversity. I would have stayed forever, but the city lacked robust media opportunities. Now, the Houston Endowment is a funder in the city’s first nonprofit newsroom, the Houston Landing. If this undervalued sleeper city becomes prominent in the nonprofit news space, the Houston Endowment will be part of that positive evolution, too.
