In rather overt defiance of the copyright laws, I've enclosed below the full
text of an article that appeared in today's NY Times, simply because I
thought that it would be of special interest to this group.
Wirt Atmar
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FOUNDATION COULD BECOME RICHEST IN THE WORLD (5/6)
By CAREY GOLDBERG
c.1996 N.Y. Times News Service
MONTEREY, Calif. - At the very summit of American philanthropy, where the
billionaire donors have dynastic titles like Ford and Kellogg and
Rockefeller, the first high-tech mogul is about to add his name to the roster
of the world's great family charities: Packard.
When David Packard, half the venerated Silicon Valley team of Hewlett and
Packard, died at 83 in late March, he left the bulk of his vast estate to the
foundation that he and his wife founded in 1964.
Suddenly, what had been mainly a regional, family-style foundation of about
$100 million just a decade ago stands to balloon into one of the top three
private charities on the planet - conceivably, depending on the stock market,
the biggest of all.
Packard left the David and Lucile Packard Foundation more than 46 million
shares of Hewlett-Packard stock, to be added to the nearly 25 million it
already owned. Once the stock is transferred, the foundation's
Hewlett-Packard holdings - worth more than $7.2 billion at Friday's stock
market prices - may surpass the $7 billion-plus funds of the Ford Foundation
and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the two richest.
For a relatively obscure philanthropy to rocket to the top so suddenly
``hasn't happened for at least half a century,'' said Michael O'Neill,
director of the Institute for Non-Profit Organization Management at the
University of San Francisco. ``It's almost unparalleled in this century, with
the single exception of the Ford Foundation,'' he said.
Although most major American foundations were created in this century, only
the Ford Foundation had mushroomed so quickly to such giant proportions. But
it may be the shape of the future. Experts believe the Packard Foundation's
spectacular rise presages a whole crop of major new family charities that
will spring up as the current ruling generation of the nation's high-tech,
financial and media magnates get old enough to start thinking about
posterity.
``We have this enormous wave of very wealthy individuals who by the clock
will be dying in the next 15 or 20 years,'' said Waldemar Nielsen, a
prominent analyst of charities. ``The resources available to American
philanthropy will probably double,'' and much of that wave is expected to
flow into family foundations like the Packard.
That will leave many a group of heirs facing the kind of $64,000 question
that now confronts David and Lucile Packard's four children, Nancy, Julie,
David Jr. and Susan: You have several billion dollars to fix the world with.
What do you do with it?
Or as Julie Packard, who is executive director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium
here, put it: ``What needs doing? And then, what can we contribute to that
list of things? What are we best positioned to contribute?''
The first thing to do, the Packards have decided in their low-key, pragmatic
way, is to stop and think about it. So the foundation is embarking on several
months of strategizing so open-ended that Colburn S. Wilbur, the foundation's
executive director, was hesitant to predict what would emerge from it.
But both he and Julie Packard would go this far: What the foundation does
will be bigger than before, and more global. Analysts say the Packard
Foundation is likely to focus even more on combating overpopulation,
protecting the environment and fostering science education and research - and
to keep reflecting the wide-ranging interests of the Packard family.
David Packard, the electronics manufacturer who launched Hewlett-Packard Co.
with his close friend William Hewlett, had an engineer's interest in the
sciences, as well as an outdoorsman's interest in conservation and a
humanist's interest in education.
His influence particularly propelled the foundation to give tens of millions
of dollars to environmental groups and education in science and engineering -
including special support for black and American Indian students.
Lucile Packard, who died in 1987, leaned more toward programs to help
children, the sick and the poor. The Packards gave more than $100 million to
Stanford University to improve pediatric care and to create the Lucile Salter
Packard Children's Hospital there.
The foundation also established a special Center for the Future of Children
and supports community programs in four Northern California counties.
Susan Packard Orr, a computer specialist who is now president of the
foundation, is seen by some as carrying on in her mother's tradition. She
declined to be interviewed, adhering to the Packard tradition - rarely broken
- of keeping a low profile.
Nancy and Julie Packard's interest in marine biology, and David Packard's
conviction that the ocean is the last great frontier on Earth - led to the
Packard donations of $180 million to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and associated
research endeavors, as well as programs to stop the depletion of fisheries.
And David Jr., who is involved in theater, is regarded by some as the driving
force behind the foundation's interest in the arts and archeology.
The foundation's grants, which totaled $116 million last year, do not distill
into a simple reflection of each family member's interests, however, and they
hold some surprises as well, including a longstanding effort to encourage
birth control around the world.
``The world is not making enough progress fast enough on getting growth rates
down,'' Julie Packard said. ``So that's another area in which clearly there's
a lot of work to be done'' - work best done by private groups that can
experiment and act without too much concern for the political climate.
The foundation, which has only about 50 staff members at its headquarters in
Los Altos near San Francisco - compared to staffs of several hundred at
foundations like the Ford - is not overtly ideological, however; it is simply
oriented toward improving lives.
Its 1996 program guidelines say it seeks to ``help people through the
improvement of scientific knowledge, education, health, culture, employment,
the environment and quality of life.''
Tall orders, all, but the checkbook is fat. Even Nielsen, known for his
trenchant tongue when he thinks charity dollars are misspent, predicted that
the Packard ``will evolve into one of the nation's most far-sighted
foundations.''
``If they really focus a good part of their efforts in a creative way on the
problems of overpopulation and the environment and so on,'' he said, ``I
wouldn't say it'll change the world, but it could make a distinct difference
in the prospects for the long-term survival of the planet.''
Many who follow philanthropy also hope that the Packard Foundation's new heft
will encourage other Silicon Valley members of the super-rich to give more.
Thus far, they have not been especially distinguished by their generosity,
with the notable exceptions of Packard and his partner Hewlett, whose William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation has assets of about $1.5 billion.
Packard's example ``has got to have some influences on the Bill Gateses of
the world,'' O'Neill said, referring to Gates of Microsoft, who has chosen
not to set up a foundation for his charitable giving.
The Packard Foundation has no intention, and no obligation, to sell much of
its Hewlett-Packard stock, officials said. It also does not plan to exert any
control beyond that of a normal investor in the company.
Although the Packard Foundation will be the largest shareholder in
Hewlett-Packard, with slightly more than 13 percent of the 526 million
oustanding shares, it does not plan to exert any special control either, the
officials said. David and Susan Packard are already on the Hewlett-Packard
board, and the heirs all have large Hewlett-Packard holdings.
Because the Hewlett-Packard stock produces little income, the foundation
occasionally sells chunks of it to finance its grants, said Jeffrey R.
Leighton, the foundation's director of finance and administration; otherwise,
it uses income from $250 million that is invested in other securities. In the
past, it has also received gifts from Packard.
Some say the great pitfall lying in wait for the four Packard children and
nine grandchildren could one day be tricky family dynamics that have turned
many a foundation into a dysfunctional mess as the generations have grown
more fractious.
But there has been not even a breath of rumor about dissension in the Packard
ranks, said Dot Ridings, president of the Council on Foundations, an umbrella
group of about 1,400 American foundations with assets totaling $120 billion.
Rather, she said, other foundation families are expecting the Packards to
provide an example of how things should be done - much as their father did in
Silicon Valley.
``They're going to provide lessons for the rest of the foundation world,''
Ms. Ridings predicted.
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