Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

10th Anniversary Letter

Nannerl O. Keohane, Chair
Joan E. Spero, President

December 12, 2007

ver the last ten years, the Trustees and staff of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation have had an extraordinary opportunity: to create a new and, we think, very special foundation based on the legacy of our benefactor. We have sought to use the significant financial resources left by Doris Duke to improve the quality of people’s lives through our four grant programs and our stewardship of three distinctive properties in New Jersey, Hawaii and Rhode Island.

Doris Duke’s Legacy

Since our earliest days, the Trustees and staff of the DDCF have been guided by the wishes and the spirit of our benefactor. During her life, Doris Duke was famous for her great wealth. Few knew the private Doris Duke, who was a musician and dancer, independent thinker, creative collector, environmentalist, and generous, innovative but very quiet philanthropist.

We have learned from her private records that Doris Duke’s philanthropy was significant – totaling approximately $400 million by our estimates – and often ahead of her time. She supported jazz artists and modern dancers in the early days of those art forms; contributed to controversial but important medical research, including early work on birth control and AIDS; and supported the preservation of habitat and endangered species.

When she died, she left approximately $1.1 billion to the foundation. Over the last decade, the foundation’s endowment has nearly doubled to $2 billion, and we have distributed approximately $670 million in grants.

In addition to a significant financial endowment, Doris Duke left three properties to the foundation with the wish that they be used for education and public enjoyment. And what amazing places they are!

Duke Farms encompasses more than 2,700 acres of undeveloped land in densely populated central New Jersey. Shangri La, her property in Honolulu, contains a diverse and very personal collection of Islamic art. Rough Point – the Duke family mansion in Newport, Rhode Island – evokes the culture of the 19th century Gilded Age. And Doris Duke’s legacy of historic preservation is evident in the Newport Restoration Foundation, which she created to preserve the city’s 18th-century architecture.

Grant Programs

We have tried to honor Doris Duke’s bequest and her life while also looking forward as she did to address the philanthropic needs and opportunities of today and tomorrow. Thus, our grant programs are wide ranging, focusing on four areas of interest to Doris Duke that were named in her will: performing arts, the environment, medical research and child abuse prevention. Over time, we have gradually learned from our experiences, and our grant programs have evolved accordingly.

The foundation’s Arts Program supports performing artists in contemporary dance, jazz and theatre, and the nonprofit arts organizations that nurture these artists and produce and present these art forms. In the first phase of our program, we strengthened performing arts organizations by providing endowment support for the creation and performance of new work. Over these ten years, close to 100 performing arts organizations in roughly half of the 50 states received our support. These grants and the DDCF-funded initiatives and programs run by our grantees have supported more than 2,200 projects across the country.

We are now looking ahead to help leading artists and organizations flourish in a world where technology, the changing face of audiences, and limited financial resources are challenging even the strongest arts organizations. While we continue to support innovative work, we have shifted our initial emphasis from endowments to helping organizations re-examine their organizational and financial structures with an eye toward the future. We are also providing increased support for national organizations and initiatives that strengthen the overall health and infrastructure of the contemporary dance, jazz, theatre and presenting fields.

In the first five years of the Environment Program, we launched the Doris Duke Conservation Fellows program to train the next generation of environmental leaders, and supported an ambitious range of land protection and conservation projects across the U.S. Our capital grants for land conservation targeted regions with significant biodiversity, and we challenged our grantees to use DDCF funds to attract additional resources for conservation. Our grantees more than rose to the challenge. They have leveraged $134 million in DDCF grants to raise an additional $557 million for conservation and protect more than 1.4 million acres of habitat.

In 2004, we identified a new lens through which to focus our conservation efforts, one with the potential to foster greater cooperation, collaboration and success in conservation across the country: state wildlife action plans, which Congress required each state to complete by 2005. We have found the plans to be an effective mechanism for steering our grants toward protecting the nation’s highest priority habitat. We are encouraged that the plans are bringing visibility to conservation needs and helping states deal more effectively with conservation issues.

In medical research, Doris Duke instructed us to support research designed to lead to cures for diseases, provided that animals were not used in the investigations. This led us to focus our Medical Research Program on clinical research, in which physician-scientists work with human subjects to translate basic research findings into new preventions, treatments and cures. We sought to address two significant concerns in the field: the diminishing number of physician-scientists and the difficulty in translating breakthroughs in basic medical research into treatments for patients.

We devised a strategy to support competitively successful clinical investigators at critical stages of their careers. By this approach, we provide fellowships for medical students, development awards for junior physician-scientists establishing their own labs, and awards for distinguished clinical researchers conducting seminal research and mentoring the next generation of physician-scientists.

We awarded our first international grants to improve the care and treatment of AIDS patients in sub-Saharan Africa by supporting clinical research and related capacity-building. We also support innovation in clinical research, with an emphasis on multidisciplinary approaches to solve complex problems in human health and disease. We have funded more than 750 clinical investigators and research teams, and the number of awardees continues to grow.

We established our Child Abuse Prevention Program in 2000. After consulting with numerous experts – as we do before developing any of our grant strategies – we learned that the field of prevention was relatively under-developed. Although many programs and services focus on working with children and families when an incident of maltreatment has been reported, few specifically focus on working with families to prevent abuse or neglect before it occurs. We chose to focus our grants on educating and training practitioners to help parents better understand child development and strengthen their parenting skills.

We support this work in places where young children and their families already are – early education and child care centers, pediatric offices and their own homes. Our grantees are creating an impressive body of work for prevention: they are testing new approaches, identifying and documenting best practices, developing training institutes and resources for practitioners, partnering with states, and conducting longitudinal research to understand what works best. We believe that there is significant momentum in this field, and a growing interest in the work our grantees are pioneering.

Special Initiatives Announced This Year

One of our goals as a foundation is to be attentive to new and evolving opportunities and challenges. We are also ambitious about finding areas where we can focus our resources and make a significant difference in an important cause. With these goals in mind, this year we launched two special initiatives.

The first initiative focuses on developing policies to advance technologies that mitigate climate change. Such policies are intended to give corporations and individuals more manageable and effective ways to reduce our impact on the environment. The second supports the development of partnerships that can strengthen the delivery of integrated primary health care in Africa. Much important work is being done to address health care challenges on that continent; one of the major needs now is to bring efforts together to reduce redundancy and transaction costs, and support good health care personnel in exemplary clinics and hospitals.

The foundation’s staff developed the initiatives in response to a challenge from the Board to identify compelling and urgent needs that fit the mandate of Doris Duke’s will where a well-timed and large infusion of the foundation’s resources – above and beyond our normal grant-making – could have a significant positive impact on society. We have committed $100 million to each initiative over the next five to seven years.

Our Approach to Grant-making

All of this work has been guided by the focused approach we established early on for making grants. We recognize the responsibility we have been given, the importance of the needs we have chosen to address, and the dangers of self-satisfaction in the foundation world.

We want to invest our resources using clearly defined strategies – an approach we believe enhances our effectiveness. Given our desire to have a lasting impact, we are willing to make large grants over a period of years to sustain individuals and organizations.

The Board mandated that we maintain a small staff to minimize administrative costs and maximize grant dollars. To that end, we often give grants to organizations that will provide re-granting opportunities to others, and we rely a good deal on consultants and outside experts rather than trying to do everything in-house. As a result, our administrative costs have averaged 11% of our total spending over the last decade.

We strive not to be isolated or insulated as a foundation. We’re in a constant dialogue with grantees, advisors, experts, colleagues, practitioners and each other to assess whether our strategies remain relevant, can make a meaningful contribution to the fields we support, and will target the most important needs. When events change the world in unexpected ways – as they did on September 11 – we try to identify opportunities within our grant strategies to help our fields respond and adapt.

In the midst of changing climates, growing health disparities in Africa, increasing tensions between the U.S. and Muslim world, rapidly changing technology, diminishing national funding streams and shifting demographics, we aim to maintain our core program focus over time while adapting our funding strategies to respond to the external environment.

Doris Duke’s Properties

We have applied many of these guiding principles to our work on Doris Duke’s properties, which are now managed by operating foundations supported by DDCF. Our first task has been responsible stewardship, to preserve these special places while adapting them and making them available to others. We opened the properties to the public, hosted students, scholars and artists, and experimented with programs to serve the community.

During our early years, we took time to live with and try to understand these complicated places and to develop our ideas about how they could be transformed from private residences to public places intended for larger educational purposes. We knew that Doris Duke wanted them to contribute to people’s lives and broaden people’s understanding in significant ways. We have now developed long-term strategies to do just that.

Duke Farms will become a place for environmental learning focused on habitat restoration, organic farming and native horticulture. We will open the many beautiful areas of Duke Farms to students, environmental experts and the public for education and enjoyment. We will create educational and visitor facilities by adapting structures built by Doris Duke’s father, James B. Duke, in the 19th century, thus preserving the Duke family’s legacy on the property.

In pursuing our major environmental focus for the Farms, we will restore damaged wetlands and other habitats. We will create vibrant outdoor gardens of native species, and we will sponsor organic farming that will link agriculture to environmental stewardship and the community. Our goal is to model environmental sustainability in all that we do at Duke Farms – from restoring the landscape to re-adapting buildings to managing our daily operations – and serve as a hub of demonstration and information for the region.

Shangri La, with its stunning site and collections of Islamic art, will become a center for the study and understanding of Islamic arts and cultures, filling an important need in today’s world. We will host scholars and artists, train students and educators, and sponsor programs that promote dialogue and understanding between the U.S. and the Islamic world.

We have also launched a new grant program through the operating foundation that owns Shangri La – the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art – to expand the mission of DDFIA beyond the walls of Shangri La and the islands of Hawaii. The grants we award through the DDFIA Building Bridges Program will seek to improve understanding between American and Muslim societies through media, the arts and opportunities for cross-cultural education and exchange.

one of this would be possible without the vision of Doris Duke, the dedication of our Trustees, and the hard work of a talented staff to ensure that we are living up to the high standards of excellence and integrity we set for ourselves. On the tenth anniversary of our first grants, we look back with pride and humility at our journey. We are proud of what the foundation and our grantees have accomplished, but we are also aware of the complexity and continuous evolution of the issues we seek to address.

At the same time, we look ahead with confidence and enthusiasm about the future of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. We will test and expand our understanding of how we can best contribute to the fields we support, given our mission and resources. We are grateful to all those who have worked to advance our goals, and we are certain that the foundation will continue to make a difference for good in the world.