Established | 1948 |
---|---|
Chairman | Robert H. Campbell |
President | Rebecca W. Rimel |
Faculty | 12 (board) |
Staff | 969 |
Budget | $250 million |
Endowment | $5 billion |
Location | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States |
Address | 2005 Market Street, Suite 1700 Philadelphia, PA 19103-7077 |
Website | www.pewtrusts.org |
The Pew Charitable Trusts is an independent non-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO), founded in 1948.
With over US $5 billion in assets, its stated mission is to serve the public interest by "improving public policy, informing the public, and stimulating civic life".
The Trusts, a single entity, is the successor to, and sole beneficiary of, seven charitable funds established between 1948 and 1979 by J. Howard Pew, Mary Ethel Pew, Joseph N. Pew, Jr., and Mabel Pew Myrin — the adult sons and daughters of Sun Oil Company founder Joseph N. Pew and his wife, Mary Anderson Pew. Honoring their parents’ religious conviction that good works should be done quietly, the original Pew Memorial Foundation was a grantmaking organization that made donations anonymously. The foundation became the Pew Memorial Trust in 1956, based in Philadelphia, the donors’ hometown. Between 1957 and 1979, six other trusts were created, representing the personal and complementary philanthropic interests of the four siblings. The Trusts remains based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with an office in Washington, D.C.
Although today The Pew Charitable Trusts is non-partisan and non-ideological, Joseph Pew and his heirs were politically conservative. The modern day organization works to encourage responsive government and support scientific research on a wide range of issues including global ocean governance, correction reform and antibiotic resistance. The mission of the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust, one of the seven funds, was to "acquaint the American people with the evils of bureaucracy and the values of a free market and to inform our people of the struggle, persecution, hardship, sacrifice and death by which freedom of the individual was won". Joseph N. Pew, Jr. called Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal "a gigantic scheme to raze U.S. businesses to a dead level and debase the citizenry into a mass of ballot-casting serfs".