Heising-Simons Foundation
/OVERVIEW: The Heising-Simons Foundation supports climate and clean energy, education, human rights, journalism, science and technology. Early childhood is the focus of its education program, while its human rights grantmaking focuses on people involved in the U.S. system of mass incarceration and immigrant detention centers.
IP TAKE: The Heising-Simons Foundation is a major family foundation that Inside Philanthropy reporter Connie Matthiessen recently described as having “deep pockets and an ambitious, wide-ranging agenda.” Heising-Simons has grown rapidly year-over-year, with grantmaking surpassing $150 million in a recent year. It is deeply committed to its issue areas, with a particularly large footprint in the areas of early childhood education, criminal justice reform, and science education. It tends to support research and policy development, systems change, and general operating support in its progressive areas of interest. It does not accept unsolicited grant proposals.
This funder, however, is highly transparent about its past grantees, and describes how it identifies potential grantees, including attending conferences, in-house research, monitoring of fields of interest and “sourcing potential leads through current grantee partners, advisors, and other funders.” It also very occasionally posts RFPs in its blog and newsletter. If your organization works in one of Heising-Simons’s focus areas, this is a foundation to place squarely in your network. Heising and Simons signed the Giving Pledge in 2016.
PROFILE: The Heising-Simons Foundation was established in 2007 by Simons family heiress Liz Simons and her spouse, Medley Partners founder and investor Mark Heising. Liz Simons has extensive experience as an educator, specializing in bilingual education. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s in education from Stanford University. She worked in Spanish-bilingual and ESL classrooms, and later founded Stretch to Kindergarten, a spring-summer early childhood education program.
Based in Los Altos, California, the Heising-Simons Foundation works to “advance sustainable solutions in climate and clean energy, enable groundbreaking research in science, enhance the education of our youngest learners and support human rights for all people.” Its funding programs are climate and clean energy, education, human rights, science, technology and society and journalism. In addition to its values, the foundation articulates a “commitment and orientation toward equity” in all its work. Grantmaking is mainly limited to the U.S., with occasional international grants.
Grants for Climate Change and Clean Energy
The Heising-Simons Foundation’s climate and clean energy program focuses on protecting the “people and planet from the worst impacts of climate change by accelerating the transition to a clean energy future.” It supports organizations that advance policies to effect large-scale progress in “curbing pollution, and to ensure that a low-carbon future is a prosperous one for the most vulnerable communities.” The foundation does so by primarily funding efforts in the U.S. focused on four strategic areas:
Securing climate policy to limit greenhouse gas emissions;
Transforming the energy sectors that are the primary source of pollution;
Cutting the most potent pollutants, such as methane; and
Seizing time-sensitive opportunities to achieve large-scale emission reductions.
Past climate change grantees include the Environmental Defense Fund, which received support for its work advancing climate and clean energy policies, and the Clean Air Task Force, which received funding for its work reducing methane emissions in the U.S. and Canada.
Climate change grants also stem from Heising-Simons’s science initiative, which runs a subprogram for climate change.
These grants support “computational, observational, and experimental research” on climate change, prioritizing research on sources of global warming and paleoclimatology, the study of climate variability in ancient times as a means of predicting climate change outcomes in the future.
The foundation also makes grants for the dissemination of research findings to experts, stakeholders and decision-makers in the fields of climate response and mitigation.
Climate grantees of the science program include the Georgia Tech Research Corporation, the University of California at Berkeley and Pennsylvania State University, which received funding for glacier monitoring work in Greenland.
Grants for Early Childhood and K-12 Education
The Heising-Simons Foundation’s education program seeks to “facilitate the creation and strengthening of early childhood systems necessary for children from low-income families and children of color to reach their full potential.” Education funding is directed toward organizations working in the state of California and nationally, prioritizing programs that serve young children from birth through third grade. The program makes grants via two portfolios, each with its own areas of focus.
Enabling Conditions grantmaking supports efforts to create and maintain “systemic conditions that best enable high-quality interactions between children and adults, and that best foster positive learning environments.” This portfolio names four major initiatives.
Grants from the Stabilizing the Early Childhood Education Workforce initiative work toward the goal of “ensur[ing] that all professionals in the early childhood education workforce have the knowledge, skills, and institutional supports needed to effectively foster young children’s growth and development.”
Data for Action refers to grantmaking and collaboration that “enable public agencies in California to meet the needs of young children and their families by using high-quality integrated data to guide continuous improvement and inform policies and practices.”
Grants for Effective Governance and Financing of State Early Childhood Education Systems aim “to ensure that state-level early childhood education (ECE) systems are coherent, functional, equitable, and financed robustly.”
Grants for the California Work Force work broadly to “elevate the value of early care and education jobs in California.” In addition to pay increases for the early childhood workforce, the initiative aims to increase access to and affordability of education and career development programs, to improve the “public perception of the importance of ECE professionals” and to support “practitioner voice.”
The Effective Practice portfolio maintains the specific goal of improving “educational proficiency rates for young children from low-income families and children of color by 10 percentage points over the next 10 years in California.” While the program is focused on gains for children in California “[n]ational work that helps advance the field is also supported.” This portfolio names three major initiatives.
Creating Coherent Early Math Instruction in California acknowledges the importance of early math skills as indicators of K-12 success. Grants, therefore, aim to “ensure that students from families with low incomes and children of color are appropriately challenged and supported in math instruction in the early years of school.”
The Ready for Emerging Bilingual Learners initiative serves the estimated 60% of California’s under-five population who speak a second language at home. Grants aim to “build the capacity of California early learning programs to support emerging bilingual learners from birth through age 8, ensuring that they receive effective and rigorous instruction so that they may reach their academic potential.”
The third initiative of the effective practice portfolio concerns Family and Community Math and makes grants to “foster positive math attitudes, confidence, and learning for children of color, emerging bilinguals, and children from low-income homes by supporting families as powerful partners in their children’s early math learning.”
Heising-Simons’s education grantees include the Public Media Group of Southern California, Black Californians United for Early Care and Education, the Emerging Bilingual Collaborative and California Education Partners.
Grants for Human Rights, Immigrants and Criminal Justice
The Heising-Simons Foundation’s human rights focus area acknowledges “mass incarceration and immigrant detention” as serious human rights issues in the U.S. Grantmaking aims “to shift power from punishment systems to BIPOC impacted by mass criminalization; dismantle these systems in the United States; and work towards reimagined approaches to justice that invest in communities rather than prisons and surveillance, and that promote practices of healing and community accountability rooted in our common humanity.” The program’s three main areas of investment are:
Supporting and scaling the work of grassroots groups that “fight to dismantle these punishment systems”;
“Supporting healthy ecosystems” for social movements for criminal justice and immigration reform; and
Reconfiguring “safety, justice, and accountability” in a reformed justice system.
Grantees of the human rights program include the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, the Solutions NOT Punishment Collaborative, the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People and Families Movement and Pure Justice, a Texas-based membership organization that works toward justice reform and to “remove economic barriers for formerly-incarcerated individuals in Harris County.”
Grants for Science Research, Women and Girls
The Heising-Simons Foundation’s science program makes grants for “fundamental research primarily in the physical sciences.” Across four subprograms, the foundation supports basic research, collaborations among stakeholders and “communicating scientific results.”
Grants for astronomy and cosmology “enhance and accelerate new scientific discoveries that illuminate basic understanding of the universe and its celestial objects and processes.” Areas of interest include the development and evaluation of instruments “to advance the observation and measurement of the universe and its constituents” and astronomical research related to exoplanets and “our solar system’s formation and evolution.”
Since 2017, the foundation has also run the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship program, which is awarded annually to eight postdoctoral scientists to “conduct theoretical, observational, and experimental research in planetary astronomy.”
The fellowship provides up to $430,000, disbursed over three years, as well as the opportunity to participate in an “annual summit to develop professional networks, exchange information and ideas, and foster collaboration.”
This program encourages “applications from individuals who belong to groups that have been historically underrepresented in planetary sciences and astronomy, such as women, persons with disabilities, racial and ethnic minorities, gender and sexual minorities, and others who may contribute to the diversification of the field.”
The climate change science focus area aims to “enable research that provides the scientific foundation for understanding global climate change and its ramifications for mankind.”
Specific goals of the program include research on the sources of climate change, paleoclimatology and “science communication, to support experts in articulating and disseminating evidence-based information.”
Climate change grantees include the University of Washington, which received funding to “develop and use novel emulators to simulate extreme weather events in past climates,” and the University of Arizona, which received a grant to “identify and characterize key chemical indicators of permafrost degradation.”
The foundation also supports fundamental physics research with the specific goal of funding research “that has the potential to enhance our understanding of the Standard Model or extend its scope.”
The foundation expresses special interest in “table-top physics” through the use of “high precision measurements” and “neutrino research,” prioritizing “new detector technologies, experimental facilities, and measurement approaches.”
Physics grants have supported organizations including the University of Maryland, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which received a grant to support a project concerning “the formulation of quantum cosmic censorship theory.”
Women in Physics and Astronomy is the foundation’s program to “increase the number of women and other gender minorities in these fields, both in colleges and in academic research careers in the United States.”
Grants target programs and projects that "improve institutional climate” for women, as well as those that “empower” and connect women to one another.
The foundation is also interested in best practices with regard to cultivating women’s careers in the physical sciences and has supported projects to “curate, analyze, and disseminate data” relating to this topic.
Grantees of this subprogram include Eureka Scientific’s International Conference for Women in Physics, the American Physical Society, the Margaret Burbridge Visiting Pofessorship at the University of California San Diego and the University of Tennessee’s Leadership Workshop for Mid-Career Women in Physics.
Parallel to this work, the foundation created and maintains the 1400 Degrees website, “a community space for women and gender minorities studying and working in the fields of physics and astronomy.”
Grants for Journalism
The Heising-Simons Foundation’s journalism initiative “recognizes and supports journalism as a critical element of a healthy and multicultural democracy.” The foundation makes grants in two focus areas and runs a journalism award program.
Grants for Underrepresented Groups and Voices in Media aim to “help increase coverage, stories, and amplification of voices of underrepresented and misrepresented communities.”
The foundation also supports high-quality Investigative Journalism as an integral part of democracy and “holding the powerful accountable.”
The foundation also awards the American Mosaic Journalism Prize, which recognizes “excellence in long-form, narrative, or deep reporting on stories about underrepresented and/or misrepresented groups in the present American landscape.” The prize targets freelance journalists whose print, audio or visual project was published or aired in “mass media outlets” during the award year. Two unrestricted cash prizes of $100,000 are awarded each year. Past award winners and FAQs are linked to the program page.
Other Grantmaking Opportunities
Heising-Simons newest grantmaking initiative is its CEO Fund for Technology and Society, steered by the foundation’s president and CEO Sushma Raman. The purpose of this funding program is to “to address the impact of technology on society—harnessing its promise and mitigating its risks.” While the initiative looks broadly across the many areas through which technology impacts society, it zeroes in on automated decision making, surveillance, disinformation and data privacy. The program has also named “the mining of rare-earth minerals, increased consumption of water and electricity, and use of child labor and AI workers in the global South” as concerns related to proliferation of technology and data sciences.
Early grants from this program have supported the Center for Media Justice, the Center on Race and Digital Justice and Just Futures Law, which used funding to organize a “data broker convening” in collaboration with Mijente.
Important Grant Details:
This funder’s grants can range anywhere from $1,000 to several million, with a majority of grants, however, falling into the $50,000 to $500,000 range.
Grantmaking is national in scope, with the exception of education funding, which focuses on the state of California.
Many grants support medium- to large-sized organizations and universities involved in research and policy development, although smaller organizations with direct impact also receive funding.
Education and climate have received the largest shares of funding in recent years.
For a broader sense of the types of organizations receiving funding from Heising-Simons and the kind of work grantees are conducting, explore the foundation’s searchable grants database or its grants overview page.
Heising-Simons does not accept unsolicited letters of inquiry, proposals or requests for funding. However, it posts RFPs on “rare occasions” via its blog and newsletter.
General inquiries may be submitted to the foundation via email or its contact page.
PEOPLE:
Search for staff contact info and bios in PeopleFinder (paid subscribers only).
LINKS:
