Member spotlight: The Heinz Endowments

There’s a foreboding sketch of an hour glass with an image of a melting globe dripping through it on the most recent edition of h magazine, the semi-annual publication produced by The Heinz Endowments. The headline on the cover declares, “Moment of Truth: Action is Needed to Address Environmental Crises Before Time Runs Out.” Read More

This month’s journalism webinar marked the second in a series exploring innovative ways to fund reporting on science, health and the environment. This time, we looked at the field of environmental reporting and heard about successful partnerships and scalable models. Read More

Grant Oliphant | President, The Heinz Endowments Early in Fiddler on the Roof, the character Tevye asks God, “Send us the cure. We’ve got the sick-ness already.” On Saturday both sickness and cure came home to my neighborhood of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh. The sickness came, as the entire country now knows and will too soon forget, in the form of a man filled with anti-Semitic hatred and armed with weapons of war who in his dark and meaningless rage slaughtered eleven innocents attending services at Tree of Life Synagogue. For much of that long terrible day, and lingering still, all I could sense was the sickness. You feel it in your bones, see it reflected back in the eyes of your friends and neighbors: the grief, the dread, the helplessness, the heavy sense that this is not the end. It was natural but pointless to ask how this could have happened. We know, we knew immediately. This ancient hatred, which America once fought a war to stop and my Dutch grandmother nearly died opposing, has been given new license in today’s America, along with so many other hatreds, so many vile new ways of beckoning old evils. But all… Read More

Media Impact Funders is pleased to announce the addition of three new members to our board of directors: Kaitlin Yarnall, senior vice president of Media Innovation at the National Geographic Society; and Tim Isgitt, managing director of Humanity United; and Carmen Lee, communications officer with The Heinz Endowments. Yarnall and Isgitt, whose appointments begin in December, and Lee, who begins her term in May 2019, bring decades of journalism, media and grantmaking experience to our board and to the fields of media and philanthropy. “On behalf of the rest of the MIF board, we are thrilled to welcome Kaitlin, Tim and Carmen, who all bring extraordinary talents and passion for our mission and reflect some of the most inspired institutions in our field,” said David Rousseau, MIF’s board chair and Kaiser Family Foundation’s vice president of media and technology. We’ve engaged with our new members in a variety of ways over the years. Yarnall spoke at our 2018 Media Impact Forum about the National Geographic Society’s experience in science media grantmaking, and continues to play a key role in our convenings around science communications. Isgitt played a key role in conversations around the creation… Read More

The recent violence in Charlottesville, Va., has thrust racist ideas into the national conversation in ways Americans haven't experienced before. Of course, tensions around race relations in the U.S. have been steadily building over the past few years, with high-profile protests around police shootings and a resurgence in hate groups. Intolerance in the streets has mirrored a spike in divisive rhetoric online, where trolls "drown out the voices of women, ethnic and religious minorities, gays—anyone who might feel vulnerable," observes Joel Stein in Time. But most disturbingly, these same sentiments can now be heard in the highest corridors of power. Read More

Grant Oliphant | President, The Heinz Endowments A common aphorism has it that “one man with courage is a majority.” Most of us instinctively don’t believe that. Most of us think one man standing athwart the tide makes for a powerful photo but a predictably tragic ending. Read More

By Grant Oliphant | President, The Heinz Endowments Lately I have found myself stupefied into virtual silence. And I know, from speaking with many colleagues and many of you reading this, that I am not alone. Read More

Editor's note: Last week, following the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and then five police officers at the tail end of a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration, Grant Oliphant, president of The Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh, wrote a poignant piece about the responsibility we have in our field to bear witness to these unspeakably tragic events. He wrote: "This is what I have to give: To say on behalf of our institution, yes, yes, we see it. We see it and it is not ok. To say, we will do our part. To protest, along with you, 'Enough, stop it, no more.'"  Read More

By Megha Satyanarayana  | Originally from h Magazine As Judy McAuley chats with customers at her baby supply store, a small white box on the counter flashes numbers on its digital display: 20, 19, 21. The customers at Happy Baby Company stop to look before paying for natural teething necklaces, cloth diapers and BPA-free baby bottles. The box is an air quality monitor called the Speck Sensor, and it’s telling Ms. McAuley that the air inside the store is relatively low in a specific and dangerous type of pollution. This is important to her because, like many businesses along Lincoln Avenue in Bellevue, a borough northwest of Pittsburgh, Happy Baby is next to the Shenango coke works. “The air gets weird and stinky in the summer,” said Ms. McAuley, who lives nearby. “You hear about how asthma rates are through the roof around here.” Read More