Michael and Jenny Messner
/SOURCE OF WEALTH: Seminole Capital
FUNDING AREAS: Education & Youth, Environment & Civic Space
OVERVIEW: Mike and Jenny Messner established the Speedwell Foundation, which funds study-abroad scholarships each year for high school students in central Pennsylvania, and focuses on restoring and expanding public parks and green spaces in the nation's cities.
According to available tax filings, the Speedwell Foundation awarded $6.6 million in grants in 2017.
BACKGROUND: Raised in Atlanta, Michael Messner graduated from Georgia Tech in 1976 with a degree in civil engineering. He cofounded hedge fund Seminole Capital with Paul Shiverick in 1995.
ISSUES:
EDUCATION & YOUTH: A hallmark program of the Speedwell Foundation are its Speedwell AFS Study Abroad Scholarships. The scholarships and study abroad programs are administered by AFS-USA. Per the foundation's website, "since starting with one scholarship to Iceland in 2007 for a student from Warwick High School in Lititz, Pennsylvania, 183 students have gone abroad on Speedwell AFS Study Abroad Scholarships, including 20 scholars in 2017."
The foundation has also supported schools like MIT, with a grant going to a smartphone transportation app project; Georgia Tech, home to the Frederick Law Olmsted Chair in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering that the couple created; Johns Hopkins; Catholic Partnership Schools; Archbishop Curley High School; Boys Girls Clubs of the Peninsula; Purdue University; Orange Grove Elementary Chart School; and Public Charter School Alliance.
ENVIRONMENT & CIVIC SPACE: The Speedwell Foundation also champions efforts to restore and expand public parks and green spaces in America's cities. Projects have included Olmsted and American's Urban Parks, a one-hour documentary that examines the formation of America’s first great city parks in the late 19th century through the guidance of Frederick Law Olmsted; and Red Fields to Green Fields, a documentary on the Georgia Institute of Technology program to "identify and plan for the conversion of distressed real estate into urban parks and greenways in 11 cities." The Speedwell Foundation also funded the Conservation Carousel at the National Zoo, one of the first solar-powered carousels in the world.
Other grantees have included Charleston Park Conservancy, East Cooper Land Trust, San Francisco Parks Alliance, The Trust for Public Land, and Charleston County Park Recreation Commission, where a seven-figure grant supported Limehouse Point Park, now called Stono River County Park. With the Shivericks, the Messners acquired, conserved, and donated the land to the commission. Overall, the aim of Redfields to Greenfields is to study the effectiveness of bringing together "private philanthropists and public entities to transform vacant and foreclosed real estate back to productive use."
OTHER: The Speedwell Foundation's grantmaking has also supported arts and culture organizations like Charleston Symphony Orchestra, Gibbes Museum of Art, Smithsonian National Zoo, and Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas.
LOOKING FORWARD: Expect the couple's tight focus on education and civic space to continue.
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