A Family Foundation’s Refreshingly Accessible Approach to Funding Research and Education

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At the risk of overgeneralizing, a lot of family foundations tend to be fairly opaque, without much in the way of a public-facing profile. Many do not have websites, post their grants online, publish annual reports and founder’s statements, or accept unsolicited inquiries. They keep their heads down and fund organizations near and dear to family members’ hearts. 

This is all perfectly in line with IRS rules, and somewhat to be expected, given the fact that they’re often smaller operations without much in the way of staff or other infrastructure. But it can make life frustrating for nonprofits looking to access new sources of funding. Given family foundations’ penchants for keeping a low public profile, the Chicago-based Brinson Foundation is something of an outlier, as it operates with a level of transparency we’ve come to demand from much larger institutional foundations.

Founded by investment manager Gary Brinson, the foundation gives out millions annually toward a mix of education and scientific research. Here are a few things to know about the foundation, beginning with its namesake.

Its founder is a storied investor and self-described libertarian

Born in 1943 and raised south of Seattle, Gary Brinson received his bachelor’s degree in finance at Seattle University. He went on to earn an MBA after his mentor, finance professor Dr. Khalil Dibee, landed him a teaching job at Washington State University.

Brinson made his fortune in the investment management world, where he founded Brinson Partners, which was acquired by Swiss Bank Corporation (now UBS) in 1994 for $750 million. Brinson, whom the Horatio Alger Association called one of “the world's most influential investment managers,” retired in 2000 and started his own private investment firm, GP Brinson Investments. A year later, he formed the Brinson Foundation, where he serves as director and chair. In 2004, he donated $3.5 million to Seattle University to endow a professorship named for Dr. Dibee.

The foundation’s site provides an illuminating look into its inner workings, including eligibility requirements, grant recipients lists for 2020, 2021 and 2022, as well as its 2022 annual report. While this level of public documentation is rare for family foundations, I was particularly struck by Brinson’s founder’s statement. 

In a climate where we’ve come to expect milquetoast Giving Pledge-esque letters heavy on familiar platitudes, Brinson’s statement, in which he describes himself as a libertarian who “values individual liberty and what Ayn Rand calls objectivism,” reads more like a manifesto, in which he argues that large inheritances “diminish individual initiative and self-esteem” and higher estate tax rates disincentivize giving. It’s an instructive window into what makes a certain kind of affluent donor tick.

As far as grantmaking is concerned, Brinson stressed that the foundation should avoid “charitable grantmaking,” which he described as “grants that deal with symptoms rather than causes,” and instead make scientific research and rational thinking a top priority. Ever the investment manager, he also wrote that the foundation would allocate a “moderate portion of the grantmaking portfolio” to “‘higher risk’ programs where the likelihood of failure is evident.”

The foundation’s president, Christy Uchida, assumed the role in 2020 after serving as a senior program officer for the previous eight years. Uchida also sits on MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving open call evaluation panel.

It has an open-door policy for Chicago education nonprofits

The foundation has two main priorities. For the first, Education, it centers grantmaking on six focus areas — health care career development; high school, college and career success; liberty, citizenship and free enterprise; literacy; STEM; and student health.

Through its second priority, Scientific Research, the foundation supports cutting-edge research in astrophysics/cosmology, evolutionary developmental biology, geophysics and medical research, prioritizing grantees that are “underfunded or at a stage in which they are unlikely to receive government funding.” The foundation also awards Brinson Prize Fellowships to early career scientists, a limited number of unrestricted board-selected Endorsement Grants, and Board Special Interest Grants that are either one-time grants or fall outside of the foundation’s priorities. 

According to the foundation’s 2022 Annual Report, it has disbursed 2,599 grants totaling $84 million since its inception. Forty-two percent of that funding flowed to its Education priority, followed by Scientific Research (20.4%), Endorsement grants (31.2%), Board Special Interest grants (3%) and Other (2.4%). In 2022, it awarded 165 grants totaling $6 million in 2022. Of that amount, 33.3% of funding was earmarked for its Education priority, followed by Scientific Research (41.1%), Endorsement grants(17.3%), Board Special Interest grants (4.7%) and Other (3.5%).

Again, it’s refreshing to see a family foundation provide so much valuable data, especially since this degree of granularity isn’t captured in publicly available Form 990s. And while the foundation does not accept letters of inquiry for Scientific Research, Endorsement or Board Special Interest grants, it invites inquiries from organizations that focus on education in Chicago and its immediate region.

Interested organizations can fill out this grantseeker information form. If there’s a strong match, a program officer will reach out to the organization to learn more. After these discussions, the foundation may provide the organization with a formal application invitation. The application deadline for the foundation’s spring cycle is late February.

It has steadily increased its out-the-door grantmaking

Last year, my colleague Sue-Lynn Moses and I crunched Candid data to understand how living megadonors give through their private foundations. We determined that many adhere to a “pay as you go” model — money comes in, grants go out and the foundation’s net assets stay relatively low. Judging by the Brinson Foundation’s Form 990s, I would not characterize it as a pure pay-as-you-go funder, although it does exhibit some key characteristics of the model.

Most notably, like many private foundations helmed by living donors, the Brinson Foundation funds its operations through contributions rather than pulling from a massive endowment. Sometimes donors contribute an equal amount year over year, while others take a more staggered approach. The Brinson Foundation falls in this latter category. Its contributions for fiscal years ending in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 were $43,000, $128,872, a whopping $10.2 million and $160,668, respectively.

On the other hand, the foundation has a large asset base relative to the amount of money it disburses. The median amount of the fair market value of its assets over the past four years was $129 million. During this same period, the median percentage of giving as a percentage of assets was 3.78%. By allocating a relatively small percentage of its assets for charitable purposes, the foundation resembles institutional foundations with large endowments (e.g., MacArthur, Ford) more than pure pay-as-you-go entities that run far leaner operations.

None of this is to suggest the foundation won’t be moving additional funds out the door in the years ahead. For starters, it has steadily increased its giving over the last four years, with the $6 million figure in 2022 representing a healthy 31% increase over 2019. And writing in his founder’s statement, Brinson said the foundation “is likely to receive considerable future funding, the size of which will be a function of investment returns, targeted allocations for my heirs, and deductions for estate taxes and administrative expenses.”