Our Leadership Over Time
The Foundation’s first decade was challenging: assets to dispose of in a way that realized good value responsibly, tensions over grantmaking strategies, the task of assembling a staff and working out its relationship with directors who had also served as staff in the early days.
A seminal figure of this period was the Foundation’s first president, John Corbally, who, with his colleagues James Furman and William Kirby, helped the directors fashion the Foundation’s early program: the MacArthur Fellows, support for public radio, investment in peace and security, mental health, and the environment among them.
The second decade saw rapid expansion and experimentation, fueled by growing assets as Mr. MacArthur’s real estate holdings were liquidated. New ventures included a leadership role in Chicago school reform and support for vigorous neighborhood development efforts in Chicago.
The Foundation launched the Population Program, with field offices in Mexico, Nigeria, Brazil, and India. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Foundation opened an office in Moscow in support of its work to strengthen universities and policy institutes in the sciences and social sciences.
Under Adele Simmons’ creative leadership, the Foundation was reorganized to emphasize cross-cutting themes that illuminated the interconnectedness of problems it confronted and the complexity of their solutions.
The third decade found the MacArthur Foundation in early adulthood: clear about its values, its mission, and areas of work in which it sought to make a difference. Under Jonathan Fanton’s leadership, the Foundation deepened investment in some of the Foundation’s most promising areas of work including human rights and international justice, juvenile justice, affordable housing, and community and economic development. He sought out and supported major new ideas, such as the Encyclopedia of Life and the Law and Neuroscience Project, and emphasized fewer grants, but for larger amounts and longer periods of time to increase the impact of MacArthur’s grantmaking.
From 2009 to 2014, Robert L. Gallucci changed the Foundation’s culture and practices, embedding assessment in all programs to ensure their impact and giving the professional staff the freedom to apply their talents. He initiated a new area of grantmaking to strengthen American democracy at a critical and challenging time for the nation, and he launched the discovery grants process to spur innovative new ideas.
With Julia Stasch as president, the Foundation narrowed its focus for greater impact. She advanced the notion of “Big Bets,” or significant and urgent investments to achieve transformative change in areas of profound concern. She also led the creation of 100&Change, a groundbreaking global competition for a single $100 million grant to enable real and measurable progress in solving a critical problem of our time. Stasch standardized and implemented a more rigorous process for developing and evaluating grantmaking strategies, and she changed the way the Foundation staffs its programs by instituting a collaborative, team-based structure that brings together the diverse expertise and needed capacities to each field of MacArthur’s work. As part of living the Foundation’s mission of a more just, verdant, and peaceful world, Stasch charged MacArthur staff to lead with a commitment to justice in grantmaking and operations through the “Just Imperative.”
